Review | Winter Chants movie review: Hong Kong village struggles to stage once-in-a-decade festival in Tsang Tsui-shan’s follow-up to 2014’s Flowing Stories
3/5 stars
Throughout her career, Hong Kong film director Tsang Tsui-shan has repeatedly returned to her home village of Ho Chung, in Sai Kung in the New Territories. It is a testament to her sensitivity as both a storyteller and a long-time resident there that she has found fresh ways of reminiscing each time she has shot in the area.
While not strictly a prerequisite to watching Winter Chants, viewers are recommended to also seek out Tsang’s 2014 documentary feature Flowing Stories to learn more about her continued efforts to shed light on the rural village’s evolving population.
Not only did the earlier film offer an in-depth look at the Taoist rituals of the village’s Tai Ping Ching Chiu festivities, which have been held once every 10 years for more than three centuries, but it also doubled as a bittersweet account of diasporic lives, as a large number of Ho Chung villagers have migrated abroad in past decades to make a living.
Winter Chants may have begun as a logical follow-up to Flowing Stories, which documented the festival’s 2011 staging and gave voice to many of the villagers visiting from abroad (mostly Europe), but the complexion of Tsang’s latest effort was changed dramatically by the Covid-19 outbreak.
The film’s early scenes see the village chief and elders meet in 2019 to discuss preparations for the festivities; its main interview subjects are a Filipino domestic helper due to return to her own country, and the twin adult sons of the village’s temple attendant who are intent on promoting Sai Kung’s traditions through a self-funded local newspaper.
It is unlikely that Winter Chants would have shone its spotlight on these disparate figures if not for the global pandemic, which forced the adoption of a simplified format for the festival in late 2020 and rendered it impossible for most villagers living overseas to return for the occasion.
What emerges is an acutely melancholic film that ponders notions of home and family through their notable absence.
One of its most poignant scenes arrives late on and shows an impromptu Zoom session at a public square, where elderly villagers get to briefly see on an underlit screen their relatives and friends stuck half a world away.
In contrast to the more personable approach she adopted for Flowing Stories, Tsang leaves many of her interviewees in this film unidentified, sometimes simply allowing their snippets of thoughts to float amid her visual documentation of the subsequently scaled-down festival.
Lending her own voice to the plainly sentimental voice-over narration, Tsang muses on questions both personal and distinctly of Hong Kong. How is this generation of emigrants different from those who left Ho Chung to seek a better life in decades past? And is a place still home if a person no longer lives there?
