Clara Law, Hong Kong filmmaker, on her movies about Chinese emigration, finding a home in Australia and shooting in the Outback
- ‘Life is too precious to be wasted on things I don’t like doing,’ Clara Law once said, explaining why a film’s marketing took second place to her enjoyment
- One of Hong Kong’s most experimental filmmakers, Law’s career has spanned five decades and a range of work, including a segment of an erotic film shot by women
One of Hong Kong’s most experimental and intellectual filmmakers, Clara Law Cheuk-yiu has always put art above commercial success.
Films like Farewell China (1990) and A Floating Life (1996) took innovative approaches to depicting Chinese emigration, focusing on migrants’ spiritual and emotional concerns rather than their economic difficulties.
Temptation of a Monk (1993) made a Tang dynasty drama relevant to the concerns of the modern world, while The Goddess of 1967 (2000) showed a bold approach to the then-new digital filmmaking techniques.
“At long last a film and a director that Hong Kong can be proud of,” wrote the Post’s Terry Boyce in a review of Farewell China in 1990. “Farewell China is one of the few local films I’ve seen that can truly claim to be international [and it] restores one’s faith that the local film industry is not totally dominated by the desire to make money.”
Law has an international background, which informs her filmmaking. She was born in Macau, grew up in Hong Kong, studied film in the UK, and now lives in Australia.
Her first film, 1988’s The Other Half and The Other Half, was a romantic comedy, which, as Post critic Paul Fonoroff noted retrospectively, was one of the few films of the 1980s to address the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997.