Family drama Montages of a Modern Motherhood is a deeply personal undertaking for writer-director Oliver Chan Siu-kuen, who began developing the feature after freshly becoming a mother herself.
Starring Hedwig Tam, Lo Chun-yip and Pang Hang-ying, the Cantonese-language film had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival last year, before making stops at the Tokyo International Film Festival and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Festival.
The film will now have its homecoming at the ongoing Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), screening in the Gala section on April 13.
“In making this film, the starting point was me becoming a mother, and how my whole perspective really changed,” Chan tells Deadline. “Before becoming a mother, when I saw naughty babies or those who can’t stop crying on the subway, I used to really judge the mothers but now I understand it’s really out of our control.”
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Montages of a Modern Motherhood tells the story of Suk-jing, who works at a small bakery, and is married to a man working as a delivery driver. However, fulfilling her dream of having a baby causes an interruption to her routines. She clashes with her in-laws, faces new challenges at work and grapples with her evolving identity.
“I talked to my friends who are parents or who were pregnant, and they all shared similar thoughts,” says Chan. “They just don’t say it out loud, but we have our small regrets and moments that we feel like we are not good mothers or don’t want to be mothers anymore. I really felt that I needed to make a film about this.”
Montages of a Modern Motherhood is Chan’s sophomore feature, after she made her debut with Still Human (2018). Hong Kong’s Golden Scene is handling world sales for Montages of a Modern Motherhood.
Chan says the first treatment for the film was a lot darker.
“The development for the film took two to three years and the previous versions were much more brutal, like I wrote about the mother going to prison, going through a trial and things like that,” adds Chan. “But as time passed, my experience as a mother also changed and I felt that I reached a point where I could look back at those depressing moments as if they are history already. There are moments that I can really enjoy motherhood and I also grew a lot of emotional attachment with my character and didn’t want to be so brutal to her.”
The film was initially titled Her Lullaby and Chan started pitching the story in 2019. “It took a lot of time to get the money and one difficulty we had is that the topic is taboo in a lot of Asian cultures and societies. It’s also a bit difficult for a lot of investors, as this space is male-dominated and they don’t really get what the pain or point is in the film talking about mothers or motherhood.”
Her film also seeks to challenge the shifting perceptions of motherhood in society.
“For Suk-jing, she benefits a lot from having a very traditional mother who is making sacrifices and is taking care of her and her brother. However, when she looks at her mother, her mother is also a role model from the last generation. Suk-jing is part of the newer generation and a modern woman, so she questions if she has to do things exactly like her mother, or if she actually has other options instead.”
Placing Suk-jing in a bakery for her work also provided a fertile playground for metaphors. Chan said that the bakery was a more visually interesting place (compared to an office), and also highlighted Suk-jing’s pride for her craft.
“It’s also like a pun, with the buns in the oven, like pregnancy. And also the phrase, ‘bread-winner’ and challenging what that really meant,” says Chan.
Creating the unnerving, richly-layered sound design for Montages of a Modern Motherhood alongside Taiwanese collaborators Tu Du-Chih (famous for his work on Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai’s films) and Chiang Yi-chen (Sima’s Song) also marked one of the most difficult technical challenges for Chan.
“I used real babies for the sound, so we have to wait for them to cry. It also made the work for our sound guy really painful, because if he can pick up the crying, then the volume of the lines is also so different. It’s also hard for us to shoot the next action or thing in the same scene because there’s overlap. But I wanted it to be a very immersive experience for my audience, with the sound,” says Chan.
“Working with the babies, they also have schedules like after a bottle of milk, they need to burp for one hour, and then they need to sleep for one hour, things like that,” adds Chan. “So if we got delayed, we couldn’t match their schedules, and then we have to wait for hours until we can get the baby in the correct state. A lot of times on set, we’re actually waiting for the baby to either wake up or sleep.”
For Chan’s next project, she says that she has two completed scripts ready for upcoming markets — one is a love story, while the other is about a single mother. She also has three other treatments in development.
The post ‘Montages Of A Modern Motherhood’ Director Talks Taboos, Challenging Parenting Perceptions & Hong Kong Film Funding appeared first on Deadline.
