The Way We Are
(Tin shui wai dik yat yu ye)

Ann Hui shows great deftness and concern for scale in her work, be it reconstituting a fanciful past or the present-day of her most ordinary characters, who are also those furthest removed from what comes to mind when we think of Hong Kong cinema. The ambition of The Way We Are lies in its title, in its small, measured gestures (changing a light bulb, slicing a durian…), in its TV-movie budget (it was originally produced for this purpose, before meeting with critical and public success), and in its unvarnished characters: a widow earning her living as a supermarket employee in Tin Shui Wai, a district with a bad reputation in the New Territories, her son Ka-on, still a teenager and their isolated and initially bad-tempered old neighbour. JB