New York Asian Film Festival (July 11-27, 2025 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

SYLVIA CHANG IN DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER

HUANG XI: DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER (2024)

A woman faces the consequences of her life

It would be hard for this film not to be a success. The director studied film at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and worked with Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien as crew member in producing his Goodbye, South, Goodbye and The Assassin/. The magnificent Sylvia Chang, who's at the center of this film, is not only a superb actress but a filmmaker who has directed three notable films. And the handling of the issues of loss and confronting the questionable choices of one's youth is fresh and original, chiefly thhrough the use of a sudden, dramatic shift from Taipei to New York, where most of the acttion transpires - a New York that seems at once down to earth and like another planet.

The filmmaker, whose second feature this is, makes wonderful use here of her familiarity with a wintry New York whose funkiness somehow seems comforting, with its comfortable, warm-coloroed Chinatown and functional mess contrasting with a gray, austerely modern and asceptic Taipei. Xi, Chang's character, is a fraught, complicated woman who comes to America to cope with tragedy, and the funk seems both a reflecton of the moral chaos and sorrow she confronts, and a kind of relief. Because this is a film about figuring out your life and how to reframe it.

The plot, with its multiple female generations (men figure only minorly), its abandoned daughter in New York and its cherished one in Taipei who didn't even know each other until they were grown, is a complicated one. But we should not get hung up on that or the issue of how to deal with inheriting a frozen in vitro embryo. Those are important details, but this is mainly the portrait of Sylvia Chang's character, the sixty-four-year-old Jin Alixa.

An opening sequence shows Jin with the main women around her. She's in Taipei, with a broken leg. Showing her own strong will, she refuses to have surgery for it, or even a cast. Present are her mother, Shen Yan-hua (Alannah Ong), who has the beginnings of dementia; her two daughters, Emma (Karena Kar-Yan Lam), who she left in New York at the age of sixteen, with a guy called Johnny (Winston Chao) who has started a dim sum restaurant; and the colorful and distinctive and not so ssuprprisingly gay younger daughter Fan Zuer (a very well cast Eugenie Liu). With Fan Zuer is Jaiyi (Tracy Chou), her "friend," or "colleague," who's obviously her girlfriend.

A thoroughly modern setup, but also a traditional one: caring for Shen is something the responsiblity-shirking Jin is nonetheless going to shoulder. She is going to reject things, but wind up taking them on or accepting the reality of them. Fan Zuer and Jaiyi, six years later, take on the responsiblilty of raising a child through in vitro fertilization. They go to New York for this, and work hard at it. But then to her shock Jin gets a call from Johnny telling her that the two young women have had a car accident, driving into a deer, and both are dead. Jin cannot believe it; but she almost immefiately packs her bags.

This is when the movie essentially begins, when Jin goes to New York to retrieve the remains of her favorite daughter and decide what to do with the contents of the flat she has shared with Jaiyi, then confront the hardest issue of all, inherited custody of a very healthy frozen embriyo. Watch Sylvia Chang's face to see how Jin deals with all the complex challenges she now encounters, how she tries to deny and reject and then wryly and wisely confronts the consequences of her actions going back many decades. The performance and the film itslef are elegant, unexpected, smart, and thought-provoking. A terrific Taiwanese study of a modern woman and a multigenerational family divided between East and West. Some have thought the run-time is a bit long; but others, with whom I agree, think they could watch Sylvia Chang all day.

Daughter's Daughter (Chinese: 女兒的女兒; pinyin: Nǚ'ér de nǚ'ér) 126 mins., in Mandarin and English, premiered at Toronto Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Udine, Sydney and Taipei. Screened as part of the New York Asian Film Festival Jul. 11-27, 2025.
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 18, 5:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

[Chris Knipp]

CHUNG MONG-HONG: THE EMBERS (2024)

A police investigation digs up Taiwan's murderous and politically complex past

The film begins energetically, from the genre viewpoint, with a murder in a busy market place full of people. The killer comes up and stabs the victim in the stomach with a big knife. He dies later in the hospital. The whole homocide squad of the cops is on the case thereafter. A big wall in their collective office is covered with maps and photographs pertaining to putatively connected cases. It's all very promising. But eventually this vastly ambitious movie gets mired in endless interviews and multiple investigatory threads whose tie-ins with Taiwan's painful history only confuse, and judging by revidews, for some locals, may offend. There is much need for reconciliation in Taiwanese history, and while approaching it through a crime drama is new and original, it may not be the best way to learn about one's national history.

It's 2006. A diligent police detective, Chang (Chang Chen) winds up investigating with his squad two murder cases ultimately seen as connected, which lead back to a communist spy case from 1956, where the victims' fathers are all linked to a reading club. (He doesn't identify the second Caotun case as connected to the market case till nearly an hour into the film.). Along the way, the detective crosses paths with a food factory owner (Mo Tsu-yi) who is also probing his own father's mysterious death, and there is a young woman (Hsu Wei-Ning) whose father disappeared, who has taught English in Thailand. Since Chang works with a squad and under a stern captain (Chen Yi-wen), this is an ensemble piece as well. And since it must meander in an understandable and engaging way, credit is due to editor Lai Hsiu-Hsiung for maintaining flow, though this is a very complicated story. One needs an elaborate plot summary going in, like with the Metropolitan Opera.

In that past era, so many tragedies," says an older cop being questoned about an old case. And this is a theme of the film, which is moody and meandering, in a sort of Zodiac style, except that the killings are not all from one source. There are a number of men identified who disappeared and were never found, including cops. The period of 1949 until 1987, the long White Terror Kuomintang (KMT) era in Taiwanese history, was one of poverty and brutality that recent-generation Taiwanese audience members are reminded of here. One person says at that time they'd as soon kill 100 people to get one guilty one. The spy case leads to a scene where the accused are executed. Chang eventually discovers that Mo Tsu-yi has set up a program of vendettas against the people who victimized his father in the past, and this leads to a climactic, violent confrontation.

The cinematography credit seems to go to director Chung Mong-hong; anyway there are varied middle-distance outdoor walk-and-talk sequences for the numerous police interviews. Nice to have pauses for breath, but one violent police raid on an unexpectedly well-armed drug dealer may make you wish there had been more such moments to liven up such a long run-time (nearly two and three-quarters hours). But the main theme, as the title says, is always the still-smouldering remains of a violent past - though the word is specifically traced back to a missing father's English crossword puzzle, where it was the answer to the clue: "what burns without a flame."

The Wikipedia article for The Embers summarizes three local paper reviews, all unfavorable, both for being too talky and for misusing or misrepresenting the White Terror era that it connects with through its police investigation story, allegedly triviliizing the sufferings of victims of the time and even portraying them as evildoers. I can't assess these claims, but it seems clear that for Taiwanese the era is a touchy topic to deal with in a genre context.

More importantly there is too much material here and a mini-series might have been the better format. Or a novel.

The Embers 余烬 (Yu Jin), 162 mins., premiered at Taipei Nov.15, 2024, receiving five Golden Horse awards; also Rome Apr. 9, 2025, Singapore May 4, 2025. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-12, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
Tuesday July 22, 8:45pm
SVA Theatre

[Chris Knipp]

WEI-HUA LAN, JING-HUA TSENG IN FAMILY MATTERS

PAN KE-YIN: FAMILY MATTERS (2025)

Coping

Taiwanese filmmaker Pan Ke-yin's feature debut grows out of his 2021 short My Sister, was made by his own company Ke-Yin Film, and utilizes the same cast. The feature is divided into four segments set in four time periods, each one focusing on a member of the Hsiao family, sister, mother, brother, father in turn, who have names corresponding to the season in which their focused story takes place. It must be observed that I did not really believe any of this for a minute, and there is no consistency of tone whatsoever. But the very harshness and simplicity gives the film a surreal quality that is not without possibilities. One thinks of Yourgos Lanthimos. The effect is of a series of interlocking short stories, recounting memorable moments in connected lives.

The first two segments, for the daughter and the mother, are both rather tense and grim: they are facing difficult problems. The third focused on a handsome young man about to do military service or go to university but with no problems yet and the world ahead of him, seems like a lark, except that he has no father. The last goes back to the first ones but, focused on the gambling father's downfall, is even grimmer.

In the first segment, Spring, the elder sister, discovers she is adopted, sending her world into turmoil and intensifying her already strained relationship with her mother, Autumn. This leads into Autumn’s arc, set in the past, where her and her husband’s efforts to conceive a son result in him asking his more stable (and fertile) friend Yuan to be a donor. When Yuan refuses to help a second time when Autumn has a miscarriage, she threatens him with her knowledge that he is gay.

The third story then shifts to the good looking younger brother, Summer, who, after graduating high school and during a regional water shortage, ends up working as a manager at Yuan’s motel. Yuan doesn't seem to know Summer has only just finished high school, though his claim to the staff that the youth has long management experience in Taipei must be a conscious lie. Summer films a longtime employee stealing from the till, but when he tries to show it to Yuan his phone won't work. During this segment Winter, the father, is gone, Summer telling Yuan the lie that his dad is managing a factory in Vietnam.

For the last segment we go back to a few years earlier when Winter, the father, is still on the scene. We knew that there was not much money. Now we realize that he has been gambling it away, perhaps to escape from the bad news that he has a low sperm count - the reason for the difficulty Autumn had getting pregnant. Addiction has at this point broken this family. Winter has not been working at his job for three months but has been pretending he is. There is not much love lost in this family. It's the rainy season, and at one point Summer is sick with a fever of 101º. He disowns his father when the latter, upset over gambling losses, stages a hostile and embarassing scene. The mother also turns on him. The film attempts a mix of pathos and warmth with a final year's end Lunar New Yeart ceremony of just the three of them, when the father has checked out, and there was no grieving.

Dramatic scenes, all these, but rather on the schematic side. Think the flash-forwards on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The effect is partly realistic, partly experimental.

Family Matters 我家的事 (Wǒjiā de shì, My Family's Affairs), 99 mins., in Mandarin, premiered at Osaka Mar. 15, 2025. Screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. It will be in compettion for the Uncaged Award at its 24th edition.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 26, 1:30pm
SVA Theatre
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Pan Ke-Yin

[Chris Knipp]

HSUEH SHIH-LING, RENE LIU IN UNEXPECTED COURAGE

SHAWN YU: UNEXPECTED COURAGE (2025)

A difficult chldbirth (a true account)

It's difficult to watch this true story of chldbirth from Taiwan without being touched. It's full of very specific and hearthbreeaking details. That does not keep some from objecting to it, for being what they think is a selfish male point of view. Be that as it may, as presented this is a tale full of love.

Le-Fu (René Liu, in her first film in 13 years) is a well known senior talent manager about to get another big promotion. She and Po-En (Hsueh Shih-ling), who directs commercials, have been together for five years and their bond is strong, but they have not married. She does not believe in marriage, at least not going into this experience: it changes that, because it is an ordeal that would either destroy the bond or deeply strengthen it, and it has the latter effect. But she is 45 and he is 32, and that's the other impediment in forming a perfect union, or so it has seemed. She isn't sure he wants to make the commitment; he doesn't think he's quite up to her standard.

This starts out seeming like a TV movie of a young man and his busy, ambitious female partner. It takes time to care anything about either person. All of a sudden when Le-Fu is under intense stress, and is celebrating her forty-fifth birthday, she collapses, bleeding. She wakes up in hospital in a windowless room where she will spend four months. In the room there is the magnified sound of a rapid heartbeat. She is four months pregnant, and didn't know it. This is the sound of the fetus she carries.

She has had premature rupture of membranes. She may miscarry. So the hosital proposes she have tocalysis, a procedure to delay or stop uterine contractions during preterm labor, using medications to prolong pregnancy so the fetus can develop normally. She must not get out of bed. She is located near an operating room, is under the care of a female obstetrician, and nurses are at the ready for any emergency. She balks at this, but Po-En is fully on board with it, enthusiastic about this new prospect of their having a child together which he did not dream of, and her natural lifelong grit takes over with this new abosrbing focus. Once the moment comes when she bonds with and starts to talk to the fetus, it's clear that she too is fully on board, and this becomes a life-and-death struggle.

Po-En attends her closely, sleeping there, while trying to maintain his own life, carryng out commercial shoots, particularly, pointedly, of a young teacher of little kids who with her young husband has been trying desperately to get pregnant through IVF, and now suddenly is so, with twins, a heartbreaking subplot. There is also a memorable visit from Le-Fu's parents, her somewhat estranged, largely silent father, whose intense private request to Po-En is a riveting moment. And Po-En attends a wedding, well into the ordeal, coverng it remotely on his phone for Le-Fu, which precipitates the final ordeal. Po-En normally has difficulty sleeping. He finds now that he can only sleep when literallly tied to Le-Fu at night, with the sound of the magnified fetus heartbeat.

The tragic outcome of another couple is heartbreaking in this inetnse context and puts us, the audience, on alert as to what may happen to Po-En and Le-Fu to the final tense moments. And they know from early in the tocalysis process that it is very possible in these cases that the child may be born prematurely and may be handicapped. There is lots of time to think about all this and for us to process it.

The film is saved from being a conventional medical tear-jerker by its specificity and authenticity. Events are heightened, stylized, perhaps glamorized as is common in such cases, but it all works. This is a beautfiful, touching film, with new things to say about the choice to have children, the complexities of life in a committed couple, and yes, the unexpecterd courage that people can discover in themselves during a prolongued medical emergency or "this long disease," our lives. The two principal actors deliver throughout and are ably supported by all the cast.

Unexpected Courage. 我們意外的勇氣 (Wǒmen yìwài de yǒngqì, "Our Unexpected Courage"), in Mandarin, 111 mins., was screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. SHOWTIMES:
Thursday July 17, 6:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Shawn Yu
Friday July 18, 8:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

[Chris Knipp]

JONATHAN LI, CHOU MAN-YU: BEHIND THE SHADOWS (2024)

A jaded private dick in Kuala Lampur winds up investigating himself, then being a police suspect

From the Hong Kong school of filmmaking comes this jaded, ironic and also tecnically up to date tale of not very successful private detective Au-Yeung (Louis Koo) who makes his living off other peoples' secrets, adulteries, or lost pets. He used to be a high level detective consulted by important people, so he says, in Hong Kong, but here in KL where he came for his wife's work, he is a nobody just scraping by.

Au's usual routine changes as the film begins when the tables are turned and he realizes he has not been observing his own life. Wives in classic noir tales like Chinatown used to come to detectives suspecting their husbands. Now the men have cause to investigate the dames. Au’s main cases for the week are: a man looking for his missing fiancée; his gangster buddy Clowy (Raymond Wong) checking up on his boss’s wayward girl, Betty (Renci Yeung). Then comes the kicker: another guy appears to have his girl checked up on, and she turns out to be Au's own wife, Kuan Weng Sam (Chrissie Chau). She's been cheating on him, and the other guy hasn't even found out she's married. The writer is having fun on this one.

Then women are dying, and Au seems connected to them. He gets questioned by police detective Chen (Liu Kuan-ting ). The strange, sad-eyed Chen has a wife in a coma, and strange as it seems all these streams converge by the end of the story. We will find Chen has a story of adulutery in his wife too, and is a murderer, though he is suffering grievously over the coma and wants his wife to come back, but she does not.

After his police questioning, Chen knows who he is, so Au decides to lay low at his gangster buddy Clowy's place. As Clowy, Raymond Wong with his bleach-blond streaks and revealing casual wear is a colorful character. When they alk together one can appreciate the Cantonese drawl in which Au is more comfortable than the Mandarin the cop chief Chen used on him.

In shock, Au abandoned his missing-persons case. Hours later, she was murdered. Then the police find more bodies, all killed the same way. As the dead-eyed detective Chen every victim seems to connect back to Au-Yeung.

Central fall guy Au-Yeung is played by the ultra cool Louis Koo, who was seen in last year's NYAFF in Soi Cheung's widely reviewed Wu Xia replay, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, where he plays a chain-smoking gang boss who poses as barbershop owner.

In this kind of noirish private dick tale a mood of existential dread is appropriate. One may wonder what this two-man directed tale written by a third man (Chou Man-Yu) is getting at with all these slutty dames, but Chrissie Chau is not that, she is subtle and beautiiful. Perhaps the film is commenting on the decline of relationships. The film weaves a tale of suspicion and danger punnctuated by complicated urban chase scenes. Au also has a little arsenal of tracking devices and other gadgetry to keep things up to date.

A festival blurb describes this Malasia-set film as stripping detective fiction "to its bones." It does feel stripped-down mainly through the early succession of similar-feeling short one-on-one scenes. But the plot is rather intricate; I didn't totally follow it. As usual with clasic noir as well as this distinctively updated variation, a moody atmosphere and a cool but downbeat protagonist are the main thing.

For more details, see Hong Kong writer Elizabeth Kerr's review in Kai Fong which identifies all the main characters. As Kerr says in her intro, this film is a "relationship drama-as-genre film," a double function that, again, is also not exactly stripped down.

Kerr points out this film, made by (Louis Koo;s production company One Cool, is part of his effort to strengthen Hong Kong cinema by internationalizing it, here with the Kuala Lampur setting and Malasian participatiion, and perhaps a structure designed, witout "reinventing the wheel, for wider audiences. Though this film falls short of greeatness, it contains hints and updated uses of GPS tracers and mobiles and urban murk that will appeal to the loyal film noir fan.

Behind the Shadows 私家偵探 (Cantonese si1 gaa zing taam, "Private Investigator"), 102 min., was released in China on May 31, 2025; in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Macau on June 12; and in Taiwan on June 18. Screened for this revew as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Tuesday July 15, 9:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

PHILIP KEUNG HO-MAN AND CANDY WANG IN POSSESSION STREET

JACK LAI: POSSESSION STREET 邪Mall (2024)

An exorcism for wartime wrongs?

This film is very polished for something shot in 21 days at night in an old Hong Kong mall, and contains an appealing grouop of characters, but as zombie vampire tales go it may lack the shocks devotees long for. As one writer says, in the early stages of the zombification, the film "leans more towards revulsion than terror" and, as a Letterboxed sage comments, the full-on fighting quickly seems repetitions. However, it's all framed in a way that is specially meaningful. It comes out of Hong Kong, once a realm of rich culural possibilities and a hotbed of exciting movie production, but now shrinking to only a hollow shell of what it once was. Thus Possession Street, whose symbolic value is multiple. According to one local source, it's one in a "noticeable roster" of films that center on "a once-familiar place of communal activities that has descended into horror and anarchy," including the films Back Home and Yum Investigation.

This "possession street" is an old mall, now in decline. Opening black and white segments, narrated in part with a voice speaking in American English and skillfully mimicking World War II newreels, show us this place was bombed by GI's out to kill "Japs." Underlying the whole story, then, perhaps, is the idea that angry, resentful spirits live in this place, lingering from a wartime massacre, because several civilians who were accidentally trapped inside a bomb shelter during an air raid turned to murder and cannibalism. The run-down recent shopping center sits on the site of this gruesome tragedy. Warm little stories follow about current inhabitants of the mall, central among them video store owner Sam (Philip Keung Ho-man) a frustrated former movie stunt man, and his ptomising and attrctive daughter Yan (Candy Wong).

We see the pair when the daughter was just a girl and was excited by lessons in doing flips and manipulating a warrior sword in midair. Now, relations sour when Sam, who has sold the sword for the money, discovers that Yan has dropped out of architeture school. She is going around with a handsome young man with a camera and now pledges to make movies, with the goal "to keep Hong Kong cinema alive." Her love of cinema of course was inspired by her father's involvement in the wuxia films people aren't buying or renting from him much anymore.

Suddenly, due to the accidental breach in a supernatural barrier in the basement, seven vengeful spirits emerge in a cloud of orange dust that begins turning the local mall dwellers into man-eating zombies, who can be identified when turned by little blobs looking rather like candies hanging randomly from their heads or faces, an unusual creation due to makeup artist Mark Garbarino. One writer sees this as the beginning of "a battle for Hong Kong’s survival," though dire city-wide consequences are only hintedf at in the dialogue.

Mai Yun Tang (Yang Weilun), a would be Taoist priest and local authority on folk ritual, teams up with Sam and Yan to set up a Taoist procedure of exorcism involving ancient passwords, diagrams, entertwined red ropes in a circle, and imprecations, carried out along with all-out bashing and stabbing of the possessed ones. This is very nicely done - though, again, I'm not sure how much hardcore fans of vampire movies would care. At film's end, which arrives at a nimple ninety-six minutes, the Taoist red rope circle has come to surrounnd a heap of scattered corpses, and, in black and white again, the intact forms of the turned locals, of all who have just died, return to say goodbye to Yan. Edward Lee, writing about this film for the English-language South China Post, thinks "the key takeaway" of this film is "nostalgia for a vanished recent past" and this may be right. It is as if filmmakers in Hong Kong are frantically gesturing to us about their sense of loss. Furthermore, I now learn that Possession Street is the former site of Possession Point, where the British took possession of Hong Kong in 1841. Perhaps that is what relly haunts them, and us. For more on the larger implications of this film see Hayley Scanlon's review in Windows on Worlds.. A promising feature debut for Jack Lai.

Candy Wong, aka Wang Jiaqing, a member of the girl band Collar, is appearing in a movie here for the first time.

Possession Street 邪Mall (or "Evil Mall"; the character refers to "unhealthy influences that cause disease" in Chinese medecine), 96 mins., debuted in the west at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival July 11-27, 2025.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 19, 3:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

MARCO NG, NEO YAO IN THE WAY WE TALK

ADAM WONG: THE WAY WE TALK (2024)

A didactic but very compelling film about deafness

In the 2024 Hong Kong film about deaf people The Way We Talk Adam Wong, cowriting and directng his sixth feature, is dramatizing an issue that hopefully is going out of existence. The invention of cochliar implants (CI) led to a banning of sign language at deaf schools, which has been compared to the wiping out of native language at North American and Australian that sought to erase their culture. It was believed (falsely) that with sign language the deaf world would invade the hearing world that deaf people were trying to enter by CI, which enabled them to learn to talk and understand speech. (According to a PBS short featuring gay deaf Gallaudet University President Roberta Cordano, we'd all be smarter if we learned sign language as well as oral language because it stimulates other parts of the brain.)

In is generally favorable Guardian review, (three out of five stars), Phuong Le comments, "Like many films dealing with social issues, The Way We Talk is not without its moments of didacticism." That's a big understatement, because this entire film is governed by its didactic purpose. But Phuong is still right that this is compensated for by the fact that an "easy chemistry" between the three lends an "infectious warmth," though though the latter phrase sounds a bit self-conscious. The point is these actors are deaf people. We're glimpsing their world, and that's more potent than the didactic purpose, no matter how overriding that is.

There's nothing like the little scenes at the opening between the two small boys who wind up getting severely dressed down by the teacher for having a little chat in sign language. Needless to say, sign language lends itself particularly well to talking during class, also to fun little chats, bursts of enthusiasm. I said something like this in a review of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's (2014 The Tribe , whose scenes acted by young Ukrainian deaf people seemed over-emphatic and mimed, adding that "sign language seems itself to involve much over-emphatic gesturing."

But who am I, after all, to say what sign language is like? Clearly it's different from spoken language, and closer to mime. We the hearing may never know what it's like to be deaf and fluent in sign language, talking with good friends - though we could certainly get to know more. What we do know is that sign language exists exclusively for the deaf, and doesn't involve sound. A different world. A deaf world. That's why it's so important to deaf people. It's reveling in being different, in being who one is. Sign language may be the key reason why deaf people have a passionate sense of solidarity.

The Way We Talk uses sound effects for the hearing audience to convey different degrees of deafness, as Darois Marder's 2019 Sound of Metal does to show the musician rapidly losing his hearing. The Way We Talk deftly switches degrees of distortion and sound levels to convey what different deaf people in a single scene are hearing or not hearing. This is particularly telling for CI sound, which varies in quality, with newer devices working better. and some surgeries more successful than others. After a spate of creaky CI sound, when a character removes her implant device and sets it on a table to think, we're overwhelmed by how beautiful and peaceful the silence, her silence, is. We see how entering "our" hearing world with Cochleal implant sound can be entering an ugly world.

The film's trio of protagonists are Alan, Wolf, and Sophie. Alan and Wolf are the two little boys in the opening scene (then played by Wong Wai Hang and Cheng Chun Hei). Wolf is the little boy who rejects CI and learning to talk. He revels in sign language, defiantly refuses the teadher's order not to use it in class. Grown us Wolf (Neo Yau, a hearing actor who learned sign language for the role) is still friends with Alan (played by first-time deaf actor Marco Ng), but they've gone different ways. Wolf is notable for his physicality and wouldn't want an office job even if his reliance on sign language didn't bar him from that. He is working for a car washing business and loves the water. He lives in a van. His passion is to go to diving school, but unfortunatrely is barred from that by the school's lack of a signing interpreter. Sign language really works particularly well under water. Sophie (as a child Law Hei Yi, adult Chung Suet Yang, also a hearing actor) is a poster child for CI, making a video for it that angers some for conrasting deaf with "normal" and saying some day with Ci "there will be no deaf people."

Alan, as planned early on, is a CI user and along with Sophie (Chung Suet Ying) and both are ambassadors for the implants and their use to aid in functioning in the hearing world and using speech. But Alan and Wolf as young adults still talk in sign language and have great fun with other young deaf people doing so. After going to uni and entering the corporate world as an apprenticde actuary,Sophie, whose mother barred her from learning sign language in the belief that it impedes learning hearing communication, now sees what she's been missing and wants to join the party. While Alan is closer to her and Wolf adversarial, Wolf begins giving her lessons in Alan's presence. One gets to feel a bit what it's like to be Sophie - and with the rest of her life too.

The film begins to be about entering a career, Wolf with diving school issues, Sophie stumbling at work because her CI malfunctions. She needs new surgery but is reluctant to get it, and starts to see herself as only a "mascot" at the insurance company. She begins to identify with Wolf. We follow the two of them as they both face conflicts with the hearing world and triumph in their own way. Alan is neglected a bit, his trajectory not made as interesting as Sophie and Wolf's.

This is an engaging film. We won't forget that opening with the two little boys delighting in sign language then getting punished for it. Things meander a bit toward the end. Mightn't some deaf people object that two of the three main actors aren't deaf? But a valuable contribution to the subject nonetheless.

The Way We Talk 看我今天怎麼說 ("Let's see what I have to say today"), 132 mins., in Hong Kong Sign Language andCantonese with English subtitles. Produced by Louis Koo's One Cool, it premiered at BFI London Oct. 12, 2024, releasing theatricfally in Hong Kong Feb. 20, 2025, with seven Golden Horse nominations and Best Leading Acress won by Chung Suet Ying. Screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Sat, July 19
6:00 PM
Q&A Walter Reade Theater
Ticket holders are invited to the Furman Gallery for Matsuri to Midnight after the screening and Q&A end.