The Art of Unrest: Interview with Leung Ming Kai and Kate Reilly

How should Hong Kong define itself beyond its colonial past? This question for the city’s political future has gained urgency since the Umbrella Movement in 2014. Conceived in the wake of the pro-democracy protest, Memories to Choke On, Drinks to Wash Them Down (2019) is a cycle of four short films that zooms in on the peculiar tensions that arise across class and language divides with regards to this question. Co-directed by award-winning cinematographer Leung Ming Kai (LMK) and writer and actress Kate Reilly (KR), the series subverts the traditional form of the epic family saga by breaking it down into four inconspicuous pairings. Forbidden City focuses on a grandma with dementia and her Indonesian domestic helper; Toy Stories stars two estranged brothers who reluctantly reunite at the family toy shop they grew up in; for Yuen Yeung, a local teacher and a foreign teacher become friends while heading towards different futures; and in the documentary segment it’s not gonna be fun, an idealistic but hilariously misanthropic young district council candidate faces the precarious political future of Hong Kong and her own existential crisis.

In November 2019, the tetralogy premiered at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and was subsequently featured in the “Ordinary Heroes: Made in Hong Kong” program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January. It is slated to be screened as part of the 2020 Hong Kong Independent Film Festival. With an outsider’s clarity and the sense of humor of an empathetic narrator, the films question and reflect on the burden of nostalgia and the privilege of hope in a restless city. I sat down with the directors to talk about the making of the works and filmmaking as a response to times of political uncertainty.

How did the series of four short films first take shape? 

KR: Immediately after the Umbrella Movement in 2014, we wrote a script for a feature film in response to the protest. We received government funding to make it, but every time we tried to move forward with the film, something would happen in Hong Kong that would make the script seem dated. For years, we worked on other projects while trying to crack this nut.

What was the original project you envisioned? At what point did it end up in this final form of four linked shorts? 

LMK: The core of the original story was one big extended Hong Kong family. We picked four pairs of characters from this cast and they became the subjects of the short films.

KR: Because of our interest in characters who are marginalized Hong Kongers, we ended up featuring protagonists who were on the fringes of the original narrative. And as events in Hong Kong keep changing, and any sort of sweeping, long-form story kept ringing false to us every time we finished a new draft, we thought that if we made simple shorts about more persistent concerns at least we wouldn’t hate them by the time we finished making them.

LMK: In the original script, there was a big contrast between all the characters, so the fact that they came from different classes and social demographics became the connection. Other than that, we didn’t deliberately try to “connect the dots.”

That organic quality shows up in the films. They are not didactic, but the viewer can observe the connections and draw an arc across the four character pairings. Almost all of the narratives are dialogue-driven and explore how relationships can change within the span of 10 or 20 minutes. The results are bittersweet to varying degrees because of what the characters learn either about themselves or the world. How did you approach writing the script?

KR: It’s easiest to talk about the third short, Yuen Yeung, because that was the most difficult to write. We wanted it to function as a meet-cute between two secondary school teachers, John and Ruth, and we had different ideas of what that would look like. Kai had sweet Asian coming-of-age movies in mind, and I was thinking about western films that have a real animosity between characters—there is an undercurrent of hostility between men and women in a lot of the movies that I like.

We spent a long time reworking the script until we were both satisfied. The final film is pretty close to the script that we wrote, which melded our two visions despite the compromises we had to make. The charged dynamic between the two leads stems in part from the contentious writing process. At one point Kai tried to explain a Cantonese saying to me (“dog bites dog bone”), and I couldn’t grasp what it meant. It was frustrating, but funny in a way that is hard to write, and I said, let’s put this in the film wholesale. 

Kai is primarily a cinematographer and he wanted to shoot on two cameras—though he hated how it limited him—so that we could have more room to improvise. We were very careful about the narrative’s structure and the points that we want to make. For example, actor Gregory Wong’s character John grew up eating fried chicken like Ruth, the American character that I play, but Ruth can’t relate to John’s experience of missing wonton noodles while in England. There is a lack of reciprocity.

What kind of dialogue did you let the actors improvise?

KR: “Finger lickin’good” in the KFC scene was improvised. They were not major changes, but were just enough that they made the characters feel alive. Not a lot of people want to sit around and talk about how they feel conflicted about salty egg yolk, but, fortunately, Gregory Wong agreed with us that it was worthy of a scene.

My favorite moment in the films is in Yuen Yeung when John and Ruth are thinking about John’s claim that the KFC near the Hong Kong government headquarters in Admiralty is the most romantic KFC branch in the city. They are standing on the footbridge overlooking the Harcourt Road overpass as they talk. The shots are framed with a sense of wonder and appreciation for everyday life. Kai, you are deliberate about the details you show from the characters’ perspectives. How did your background as a cinematographer inform the visual decisions you made in presenting Hong Kong in this way?

LMK: Deciding to shoot the conversations with two cameras was like chopping my hands off, but, in a way, it was necessary because I was trying to focus on framing and making it personal. We had some tricks, like using cheap versions of anamorphic lenses in real locations, which I don’t think is common in Hong Kong movies. I paid a lot of attention to which parts of the locations were workable. For example, the cooked food market where the characters in Yuen Yeung eat French toast doesn’t actually serve French toast, but the restaurant that made the food wasn’t fitting for the sequence.

I intentionally wanted to shoot in different aspect ratios for different parts as an aesthetic choice that matched the content of the films. Forbidden City was informed by the history of Hong Kong television and is in a 4:3 ratio. Kate made that choice actually.

KR: The actress who played the maid told me that a lot of Indonesian women who intend to apply for domestic work in Hong Kong watch old Hong Kong dramas to learn Cantonese. Grannies in Hong Kong also watch a lot of soap operas on TV.

Forbidden City, the first short, stood out to me because the dynamics between the domestic worker and her elderly ward are ubiquitous in Hong Kong, and yet are rarely probed on screen. At the same time, their relationship is also about the parallels between two generations of migrants who have been integral to the making of Hong Kong. Sham Shui Po, a neighborhood with a rich immigrant history, is featured in the second short Toy Stories and the documentary segment. Is Sham Shui Po a special neighborhood for you?

LMK: It is quite special. That district is my home. It is famously made fun of for being the “poor shithole of Hong Kong,” but then it became more interesting because of the immigrants who would come for old washing machines, used electronic parts, and toys. Now coffee shops are moving into the neighborhood. Jessica, the district council candidate featured in the documentary, is from the same district. Wherever she went, we would follow her with the camera.

Why did you want to make a film in response to the Umbrella Movement? What did you want to say with this medium?

LMK: After a social movement like that, I appreciated the place and the people more, and wanted to make a movie about that and the aftermath.

KR: He was very moved. At the time, I was stuck in New York, but Kai came back to Hong Kong for the protests. I have spent a lot of time in the city since we started dating in 2008, so I had very striking impressions of the place.  We had a great urge to make something.

LMK: There is no way [Reilly] would make a movie that has no politics in it. And I think her perspective as someone who has not grown up here is very valuable. We wrote the script together and felt we could look at things from a viewpoint outside of pure localism. We were not trying to make the movie on the movement or city, just something from a different perspective.

I would like to go back to what you said earlier about adopting the shorts format in reaction to the rapidly changing times and political uncertainty. During the anti-extradition protests in 2019, some people in Hong Kong seemed reluctant to seek out entertainment, like movies, because they felt they should be civically responsible and spend time in social activism. How did your films fit into this climate?

LMK: We try to make films about things that won’t change: there will always be people who are alone, people struggling for jobs, young people having to take control of the universe one way or another—that’s not going to change. The events are external, but the relationships and the struggles are the same.

Throughout the process of making the films, we were conscious of the explicitness of the politics. The political aspects of the work don’t need to be pronounced, but shouldn’t be missed.

KR: When the Rotterdam International Film Festival announced a program of Hong Kong sociopolitical films, one guy on Twitter said he couldn’t even watch Ten Years (2015) [a series of speculative shorts about Hong Kong’s dystopic future in 2025, as civil rights and the city’s autonomy crumble]. I said, this one is very gentle, some of it is even cathartic. But I get it. There is ongoing trauma. I hope people might be convinced to see more work like this, or produce work that is not so unremittingly dark.

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