Hong Kong director Judy Chu tells a very intimate story with her first feature film “Sunshine of My Life”, in a drama that deals with a lot of important universal topics.
Sunshine of My Life is screening at Five Flavours
The protagonists of the story are a blind couple who raise their daughter on their own. First we see the small family when the child is a few months old. Because the mother can't see, an accident happens at home. The child gets burned by a hot pot of rice. From then on, the couple takes a lot of measures to protect their daughter and finds a way to cope with a series of distinct situations. Years later, the child is an impatient teenager. She helps a lot at home and her parents have gotten used to that. But Tsz-yan has her own dreams. She wants to study art abroad, to be independent. She is torn between her sense of responsibility towards her parents and her own needs.
“Sunshine of My Life” is not the first film of the last years to cope with a similar topic. It recalls particularly the family drama “Bori” by director Kim Jinyu. There, also a girl is the protagonist, and tells from her perspective how it is to live in a family whose members are all deaf. She is the only one who can hear. Like “Bori”, “Sunshine of My Life” is also dealing in a sensitive way with disability. It is obvious that director Chu knows exactly what she talks about. And in fact, she has herself grown up with blind parents. The film is autobiographical.
Still Chu manages to develop her characters with a lot of nuances. None of them are impeccable. All of them are silent heroes however, but not to a very melodramatic level. Actually, Chu balances the tone of the film very well. Every time some more emotional scenes appear, she adds irony and humor, to avoid a too serious outcome. Still there are very touching episodes in the film. One is when the parents desperately search for their daughter in the streets and it's raining heavily.
The pace is dynamic, the visuals are not too elaborated, but serve the story just perfectly. The biggest strength of “Sunshine of My Life” is without doubt the excellent cast. It is always difficult to play characters with disabilities, but both Kara Wai as the mother and Hugo Ng as the father do a remarkable job. Compared to them it was not easy for Karena Ng, who plays the daughter to keep up, but it's exactly her gentleness and silent elegance that convinces nonetheless.
Judy Chu's film is in the first place an homage to her parents, but it raises very important issues that concern all of us. It shows that each person has its skills, even though it might seem differently. And family can mean different things and can take different forms. “Sunshine of my Life” is a coming-of-age and at the same time very empowering story about outsiders
