The Outsiders

Clara Law (羅卓瑤) is used to being an outsider.

"I've always been between cultures," said the filmmaker who has made the trauma of immigration and displacement the theme on which she has built her reputation. Born in Macao and given a traditional Chinese family upbringing, she was educated at an English-language school in Hong Kong, then studied film in the UK. "So very often I feel my life is drifting. I constantly have an urge to find my roots," she said, speaking in a mixture of Mandarin, English and Cantonese.

The immigrant experience

This drift between cultures has been the inspiration for her, with scriptwriter-husband Eddie Fong (方令正), to be among the first, and perhaps the best, artists to chronicle the Chinese diaspora on film. Their work on this theme can be seen in such films as their award-winning films Farewell China (愛在他鄉的季節, 1990), a tragic story of Chinese illegal immigrants in New York, Autumn Moon (秋月, 1992), a poetic look at the pre-handover immigration boom, and Floating Life (浮生,1996), a family drama about Australian Chinese. These works have been labeled the Immigration Trilogy by Hong Kong film critics, and are the core of Law's oeuvre.

"We are not specifically talking about immigration. Rather, we intended to talk about the widespread alienation of modern urban life, a kind of existence without roots," said Eddie Fong. This theme is also the subject of Law's latest film, The Goddess of 1967 (女神1967).

Law and Fong have cooperated on 12 films, with Law directing and Fong always scriptwriter and sometimes also producer. It's a professional relationship rarely seen within the Hong Kong film industry, but which Law and Fong see as providing an important balance.

"I am more analytical and more aware of the story's structure," Fong said. "She is more intuitive." Law agreed, saying, "He works slowly and I rush everything, making big strokes. I sometimes can't stand the way he goes back and forth over the story."

Working together, Law and Fong made Autumn Moon a Golden Leopard winner and Floating Life a Silver Leopard winner at Locarno. The Goddess of 1967 was nominated for a Golden Lion (Best Picture) at Venice 2000, and helped Rose Bryne to a Best Actress award at the same event.

A broader canvas

The success of the Immigration Trilogy is only part of Law's achievement. Law has taken bold steps outside the realm of urban drama with such period pieces as Temptation of A Monk (誘僧, 1993), Great Conqueror's Concubine (西楚霸王, 1994), and Reincarnation of Pan Jin-lien (潘金蓮之前世今生, 1989), where she has drawn from classical Chinese literature to discuss the themes of desire and ambition.

Critics have applauded Law's skill at capturing the subtle emotions of encounters between strangers. The characters are usually displaced from their familiar environments, and are forced to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers. Their emotions are intensified by their inability to communicate directly.

In Farewell China, Chinese immigrant Tony Leung (梁家輝) meets up with an American Chinese girl while searching for his wife in New York. They communicate in a mixture of broken Chinese and broken English, a situation that highlights their alienation from the world around them and their lack of any clear cultural identity. This device is repeated in Autumn Moon and Goddess (see mini reviews). Speaking of the two main characters in Goddess, Law said, "In the end they are not communicating through language at all but through something else."