Actress

This film picks up where Kwan's Rouge left off, measuring people of present-day Hong Kong against their forebears of the 1930s and charting both the gains and losses of 'progress'. The forebears in question are the Shanghai film-makers who gave Chinese cinema its golden age; the film centres on the great proto-feminist actress Ruan Ling-Yu, who was hounded to suicide by gossip tabloids at the age of 25. The present-day participants are Kwan himself and his cast and crew, seen interviewing veterans from the 1930s, looking at clips from Ruan's surviving films, and discussing their own work. Nothing like an orthodox biopic, the result is tender, vivid and almost overwhelmingly moving.