Sunday, March 29 at 6:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center – 164 N State St
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
AH YING
Directed by Allen Fong • 1983
In Cantonese with English subtitles
Less known today after his disappearance into the wilds of local television and independent documentary cinema, director Allen Fong was considered one of the leading lights of the Hong Kong New Wave throughout the 1980s. While his better-remembered, more commercially oriented peers pushed the visual language of genre cinema to its outer limits, Fong’s films took a more naturalized approach, focusing on working-class characters and often pulling their narratives from their cast and crew’s real, lived experiences. Ah Ying, his international breakthrough, was inspired by the life of fish vendor-turned-actress Hui Sui-ying who stars as the titular main character. With its cast of nonprofessionals pulled from Hui’s real-life family and friends, Ah Ying is an especially committed exercise in verisimilitude, tracing the arc of Hui’s relationship with her artistic mentor and the beginnings of her stage and screen careers. Ah Ying will be preceded by an additional item from the Chicago Film Society collection: Theory of Achievement, a short film directed by Hal Hartley presented in a brand new 16mm print. (CW)
110 min • Feng Huang Motion Pictures • 16mm from the Chicago Film Society collection, permission Sil-Metropole Organization
Preceded by: “Theory of Achievement” (Hal Hartley, 1991) – 18 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society collection
“The first impression left by Ah Ying is its immediacy: the mixture of raw and sophisticated colors, the noise of Hong Kong, the oddity and impulsiveness of the people that suggests how near the film is to documentary… Ah Ying is a film of much promise and many virtues—it is gentle, funny, observant, compassionate; it has a fine sense of the great varieties of Chineseness in the world today, and of the precarious poise of Hong Kong; but it is most acute in its feeling for actuality turning inevitably into a composed story, of the raw seeming chosen. — David Thomson
“The better I got to know Ah Ying, the more it struck me that her life reflected a great deal of contemporary Hong Kong: its quality, its tensions, and its contradictions.” — Allen Fong (1983)
From the Collection: This season at the Gene Siskel Film Center we’ll be highlighting prints from the Chicago Film Society’s collection, which has grown over the past decade to include over 3,000 individual items on 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm, most representing movies that aren’t available on film through distribution companies or other archives. We loan prints from the collection to venues all over the world and all over the country (last year over 5,000 non-Chicagoans attended screenings of our prints in other towns), but this is the first time we’re highlighting our collection in a series right here where we live!
NEXT UP: REDS on Monday, April 6 at Music Box