Hong Kong Reviews Reviews

Documentary Review: As Time Goes By (1997) by Ann Hui and Vincent Chui

“Like getting all your friends on camera!”

Let’s put aside the film analysis for now. What we have here is merely a local TV news segment challenging the label of “documentary”, just good enough in quality as bonus on DVDs to encourage the purchase of a particular edition (as seen with the Criterion Edition of ““), usually finding its way soon after onto YouTube under Creative Commons licenses. No significant work on structuring or editing has been undertaken; the result is a compilation of DV Cam footage, often with intrusive background sounds, along with archival materials and photographs, all patched together. That said, is the film worth viewing? Certainly, if you have an interest in or the English era of Hong Kong.

Check the interview with the director

Produced by (‘s “Center Stage”, Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Beijing Bicycle”, Tsai Ming-liang’s “The Hole”) as part of a Taiwanese series titled “Personal Memoir of Hong Kong” which includes contributions from Stanley Kwan among others, the project aimed to serve a dual purpose: as a self-portrait and as a snapshot of the transformations within the former British colony in the decades leading up to its retrocession to China.

“What Hong Kong means to me is not the place, but the people. To make this film makes me reflect on the people I know intimately, and of myself – how I have become the person I am. So, I grouped some schoolmates together to have a chat about our past.” introduced the director herself.

In a nutshell, the concept involves attending a dinner with friends from Ann’s student years who have not seen each other for 30 years. As is typical with such gatherings,, the subjects of conversation naturally bounce from one to another without a particular logic or order.

But who are our dining guests tonight? They are all HKU alumni, in their 50s at the time: Heung, a schoolteacher; Michael Luk, a college lecturer; Dominic Tsim, who has transitioned to a career as a strategy consultant; and Margaret Ng, a barrister and journalist-columnist (formerly for the once prestigious South China Morning Post).

As a brief aside, a quick word about Mrs. Ng: following the pro-democracy movement of 2019, she was sentenced to 12 months in prison and is currently one of the few remaining lawyers defending pro-democracy victims against the recent Hong Kong’s security law. “People like me,” she said about her early political engagement, “don’t engage in campaigning; we view it as public service… Serving the people, rather than pursuing political ambition.” This is the situation that creates heroes.

Bringing the discussion back the retrocession context, we follow Ann Hui in various places she lived and studied. Before Hong Kong evolved into the “Crazy Rich” city of the 1980s, it was a somewhat impoverished colony that was tremendously developed by this generation of entrepreneurs who leveraged the British educational system rather than resisting it.

“It was the 50s, shortly after the communists took over. The camps were clearly defined, “leftists” and “you pai”. “you pai” meant Taiwan’s Kuomintang and “leftists” meant mainland China. Since we were kids, we didn’t know which newspaper represented which camp. It was all very confusing.”

Elsewhere, we can recognize the decisive cultural impact of the Wu Xia (Chinese swordplay stories) serials in newspaper, emphasizing the impact of Jin Yong’s novels (with all of them later pursuing literature studies). Notably, this inclination is reflected in a few of Ann Hui’s epic films, such as “” (1979) and “” (1990) though her major success came with her social dramas. Less influenced by classical literature, she admitted, although, to having read two of the Four Great Classical Novels. More intriguing, as she points out, reading newspapers in their entirety was a daily routine, no matter what the topics were. It could have somehow contributed inadvertently to shaping her social consciousness.

The most obviously interesting part is when she confesses the origins of her film career while studying her master’s degree : “That was the beginning of the most boring part of my life. That year, every possible bad thing happened to me. Every night at 9 I’d run to the office to read books, returning home at sunrise. I started having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t sleep for 6 months. Then, I started getting sick, my thyroid gland. I couldn’t do anything at all. But I didn’t give up. A new teacher saved me. During one of our conversations, he told me to study film. The gap between culture and reality was irreconcilable then. In the end, I was very lucky to be able to work in film. What’s so ironic about it is I ended up being a realist director. Being a political director.”

However, her more intimate biography remains largely undisclosed. We find out that she had a Japanese mother, featured in several scenes, who appears as strict and cold as one might expect, but she does not seem to have particularly suffered from it in her youth.

“I’ve known my mother for 50 years. I think I understand her now. It makes me happy. I feel the same way about Hong Kong.” she concluded.

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