City of Glass

Director Mabel Cheung and scriptwriter Alex Law once again based their work on personal experience, their shared history as the University of Hong Kong students. In 1998, when the University's women dormitory Lady Ho Tung Hall was about to be demolished and rebuilt, Cheung decided to use that as a setting for a love story that spans 20 years, casting Shu Qi and Leon Lai as campus couple in the 1970s. Lai's character, while attending the University, is arrested for his political activities and has to continue his education overseas. Separated, they each get married and have their own families. In 1997, shortly before the Retrocession, they meet again. The burning love of youth is rekindled two decades later. But then, fate intervenes and tragedy ensues, bringing the man's son (Daniel Wu) and the woman's daughter (Nicola Cheung) together. The love stories of separate generations intertwine, played out against the parallel histories of two different eras, the interplay between the personal and the historical eventually coalescing into an epic tale of time and place.

Courtesy of Orange Sky Golden Harvest Entertainment Group

Cheung's Statement

It all started when I learnt that the University of Hong Kong was going to pull down its only ladies' hall where I spent my adolescent years. With its disappearance, it seemed as if part of my youth and memory was going to be buried along with it. Then came the news that Hong Kong's only airport, which had accompanied the Colony to grow from a small, remote island to a modern, cosmopolitan city during the past 50 years, would also be replaced in due course. It suddenly dawned on me that a lot of the things which I had taken for granted and had assumed would last forever, were in fact very transient and fragile. We are living in a city of glass, full of illusions of grandeur which can disappear without a trace in front of our very eyes.

As a director, I want to capture on film the world that I knew before it's too late. In a way, City of Glass is a story of two generations of Hong Kong-born and British Colony-educated young people facing the immense changes brought about by the Retrocession in 1997, the year in which Hong Kong returned from Britain to China. But basically this is a film embodying three love stories: one between two people who grew up in Hong Kong in the romantic 70s; one between their children who returned to the city in the turbulent 90s; and finally, one between myself and the city which I have loved for a long, long time without knowing...

# Post-screening talk with Mabel Cheung, Alex Law and Dr Ng Chun-hung

The contents of the programme do not represent the views of the presenter. The presenter reserves the right to change the programme should unavoidable circumstances make it necessary.