Star of Hong Kong

Dir: Yasuki Chiba
Scr: Ryozo Kasahara 
Prod Cos: Toho (Japan), MP & GI (Hong Kong)
Cast: Lucilla You Min, Akira Takarada, Reiko Dan, Jimmy Lin Chong, Wang Yin
1962 (Japan) 1963 (Hong Kong) | Colour | DCP | Mandarin, English and Japanese | Chinese Subtitles | 109min

Japan’s Toho partnered with Hong Kong’s MP & GI to produce the ‘Hong Kong Trilogy’ in the 1960s. All three box office hits feature Toho’s headliner Akira Takarada and MP & GI’s ‘It Girl’ Lucilla You Min whose characters are always drawn together by fate in a cross-cultural love story. In Star of Hong Kong which is the second instalment of the Trilogy, You plays a girl from Hong Kong who falls in love with a Japanese man (Akira Takarada) while studying medicine there. Knowing that her friend has feelings for him and bound by duty to follow in her father’s footsteps to become a dedicated doctor, she chooses to forsake love. But the man is determined to follow her to the ends of the earth and she is forced to face her true feelings again and again. You was said to have designed nearly all her costumes in Star of Hong Kong. She wore Western dresses, Japanese kimono and, certainly, Chinese qipaos, which was her ‘trademark’ to her Japanese fans, as the perfect embodiment of tradition and modernity.

Courtesy of Cathay-Keris Films Pte Ltd