Passion / Starry Is the Night
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Echoes From Spring Street: The World of Sing Lee and Chinese-Language Cinema in L.A.. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
In person: Introduction by Archive Research and Study Center Officer Maya Montañez Smukler. Q&A with Michael Berry, director of UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, and guest programmer Janet Louie, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University.
Passion (1986)
Sylvia Chang directs, writes and co-stars in this story of best friends Wendy (Chang) and Ming (Cora Miao), who fall in love with the same man, John (George Lam). Chang — described by The New York Times as “Taiwan’s answer to Barbra Streisand” — is also an accomplished singer, and she demonstrates her deft skill behind the camera in this D&B Films production, her second directorial effort. Melodrama shapes the film’s emotional terrain, as tensions unfold over decades and the characters face moral dilemmas that pit fidelity and friendship against the reckless pull of passion.
Director/Screenwriter: Sylvia Chang. With: Sylvia Chang, Cora Miao, George Lam, Chung King Fai.
Starry Is the Night (1988)
Prolific filmmaker Ann Hui plays with narrative structure as a means of exploring character interiority in this intergenerational love story between Chui Mei (Brigitte Lin) and her lovers, Dr. Zhang (George Lam) and Tian-An (David Ng). Lin delivers a tender performance as an ordinary woman confronting her past affairs while contemplating future entanglements. (She would later gain further acclaim in the wuxia genre of martial arts epics.) Lam once again co-stars as a tormented love interest whose brooding sex appeal makes him irresistible yet ill-equipped to navigate the temptations of human nature. A Shaw Brothers and Tomson Films production.
Director: Ann Hui. Screenwriter: Leung Suk-Wah. With: Brigitte Lin, George Lam, Derek Yee Tung-Sing, David Wu, Rebecca Pan, Yip San.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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