‘Girlfriends’ in Macau: Tracy Choi’s Emotionally Complex New Film

In director Tracy Choi Ian-sin’s latest film, Girlfriends (女孩不平凡), the main character, Lok, is a thirtysomething filmmaker from Macau living in Hong Kong. Choi is a 37-year-old filmmaker who was born and raised in Macau, who spends a lot of time in Hong Kong for work. When Lok’s partner demands a commitment from her, she reflects on her life, on going to university in Taipei and discovering her sexuality in her teens. As it happens, Choi went to university in Taipei too. In Girlfriends, Lok is dating a woman whom she treats terribly, in the way only a 22-year-old can, which raises the question: is there some poor soul out there still licking wounds left by Choi?

“Come on,” she protests with a robust laugh. “University is when we all act like this.” The laughter is echoed by the film’s co-star Elizabeth Tang Tao, who plays the not-so-sensitive Taipei university student. “We went over this part of the script quite a bit — me, the producers, the writers — because from my point of view she was supposed to be quite terrible in her relationships, and we wanted that to feel real.” 

As the saying goes, write what you know — and so Choi did. Girlfriends was born during the pandemic, when, like most of us, Choi had time on her hands and even more time to think. Several years had passed since she had shot her first film, Sisterhood, and she was thinking about what to do next. “I was writing with a friend and we decided on a story about a girl screwing up,” she says. “It’s based on me, but later on, because of the cast and crew we chose, we changed it a little bit.” 

Choi doesn’t reveal if she’s a heartbreaker, but she does address a scene early in the film where Lok meets with a producer who has a laundry list of unhelpful notes for her film. Is that true to life? “Always,” Choi says with an eyeroll.

Emotionally complex

When we meet, it’s an unseasonably warm February morning right before the lunar new year, but Choi and Tang are decked out in long sleeves — all their meetings are indoors and in Hong Kong, it’s always cold inside. Choi is wearing her customary cap and jeans. Gone is Tang’s spiky orange hair from the film.

The following week, the pair will be attending the film’s glossy premiere in Macau. Tang will be just visiting, but Choi still lives in her hometown, where she admits filmmaking began as a fun hobby to dabble in with friends. It blossomed into something much more as she got older, which prompted her to move to Taipei, where she studied cinema at Taiwan’s Shih Hsin University, something she credits with broadening her worldview. She moved back to Macau to work in television at Teledifusão de Macau, and on shorts and documentaries, one of which was her coming-out doc I’m Here (2012), a favourite at the Paris International Lesbian and Feminist Film Festival. Her next stop was a master’s degree in film production at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, after which she headed back to Macau again to work on Sisterhood (2016). Her debut feature was the audience award winner at Toronto’s Inside Out film festival, and it featured then-unknown actors Fish Liew Chi-yu and Jennifer Yu Heung-ying in some of their earliest performances.

Girlfriends is told in three chapters unfolding in reverse chronology, each covering three distinct periods in one woman’s life. The film begins with 34-year-old Macanese filmmaker Lok (Liew, Someone Like Me) getting into an argument with her actor partner, Bei Bei (Yu, In Broad Daylight) after Bei Bei ambushes her, telling her they’ve bought a flat in Macau. She floats the idea of finding a couple of gay men to marry in order to be able to exploit heteronormative rules, regulations and, above all, dodge questions from nosy family members. We then step into Lok’s memory for a glimpse at the forces that made her who she is: Qing (Taiwanese actor Han Ning), the selfless budding graphic designer she dated in university; and realising her sexuality at 17 (played by Natalie Hsu En-yi, Measure in Love, Last Song for You) thanks to her first crush, Fei, and exploring the world through moving images. 

Girlfriends is very much a thematic companion piece to Sisterhood: an emotionally complex portrait of marginalised women who find their bonds tested, but sometimes strengthened, by the world around them. Girlfriends touches on issues of how LGBTQ+ people navigate Hong Kong, parental denial and expectation, and social pressures that can become obstacles to living authentically. Crewed almost entirely with women in key positions, co-written by Sebrina Zheng and Lou Shiu-wa (whose script for True Love For Once in My Life trod similar ground) and shot with almost tactile colour by cinematographer Simmy Sin Mei-cheong, the film is very simply a character study dressed up as a relationship drama. 

“In this final version of the script, I think the characters sometimes see themselves as aliens,” theorises Choi. “I think of this as the main theme, that Lok, and Qing and Bei Bei and [Sisterhood’s] Sei and the rest think of themselves as a little bit ‘othered.’ I’m quite interested in women that don’t really fit in sometimes.” That’s not entirely surprising given Choi counts author Virginia Woolf and director Ann Hui among her influences. “I really admire Ann’s versatility and the honesty of her filmmaking,” she says.

A new generation

The honesty in Girlfriends is rooted in the performances by some of Hong Kong’s brightest stars. Liew is currently starring in Lunar New Year box office monster Night King, Yu is shooting The Sparring Partner producer Jason Li’s directorial debut, and Hsu has broken out with 12 films since 2023. But it’s Tang that truly carries Girlfriends as Lok in transition — and who has the bulk of the film’s relatively explicit sex scenes. It’s not Heated Rivalry, the Canadian gay hockey show that has gone viral around the world. But for Asia’s more sensitive ratings boards, its unvarnished intimacy is quite daring. It did, however, earn a rare IIB for Hong Kong, odd for a film with LGBTQ+ sex and women experiencing pleasure. Choi admits the film’s in-your-face nature was by design, and that sex isn’t always titillating; it can tell the story. 

“This is a toxic relationship,” Choi says of Lok and Qing. “And sometimes it’s hard to explain that in a short time or in words. So we thought maybe through intimate scenes we could show who Lok is at different stages.” Lok and Qing use sex to avoid real problems, but Lok’s youthful fumblings are revelatory. Choi and Tang agree that having an intimacy co-ordinator — a relatively new set job — helped make shooting those five minutes easier by giving them time to build trust. It’s obvious in Tang’s performance, her first significant film role (she was in Erica Kwok Chung-yee’s short 28).

“I consider myself an intuitive person, and during casting I felt an honesty in the story, of sharing it, and that’s what attracted me to the role,” says Tang, explaining she found similarities between herself and the character. “Despite where I am at this particular moment there are things in the past that resonated with me. There’s a sense of anger towards the world and to herself, and an inability to express that anger, so much so she transports her to a different place so she can reinvent herself. I got it.” 

Tang isn’t a classically trained actor, and says she was drawn to acting by a desire to connect with people, both audiences and other actors. She earned a Golden Horse nomination for supporting actress, and two forthcoming Hong Kong Film Award nods for best new performer and, again, supporting actress in a controversial year; four eligible films were disqualified from consideration with no reason provided.

The queer challenge

Censors are one hurdle but funding is quite another. Like many independent filmmakers, Choi is hamstrung by her content: feminist, queer, female and introverted. It helps to have her own production house, which she shares with fellow Macau director, Madalena’s Emily Chan. So does being a Macau resident, which opens up extra funding sources. But investors remain skeptical about films centring women and it’s a point of frustration. 

“Women are one thing, and it’s another to talk about LGBTQ issues,” Choi huffs, noting that even Sisterhood’s focus on homecoming was overshadowed by the ambiguous relationship between two main female friends. “Plus when you talk about LGBTQ issues it cuts out a lot of markets, so investors will think long and hard about it. Hong Kong box office for lesbian films is quite horrible, so everybody told me I shouldn’t even bother.” She shakes her head. “It was hard.”

Choi insisted on location shooting and, in her modest way, threw her support behind Macau’s tiny film production scene. For all the hand-wringing over Hong Kong’s film industry, Macau’s is even more tenuous. Choi tips her hat to new government support for cinema over the last couple of years, but notes there’s even less professional development opportunity there. If the city lures a foreign production, it usually brings its own key creatives — cinematographers, production designers, effects artists, costume designers and so on — leaving locals out in the cold. 

On top of that, Choi would love it if her hometown showed another face to the world. “I want Macau to be better, or at least be better in film — not just a place gangsters escape to in Hong Kong films, or purely for gambling in mainland China films.”

Coming up on the new year holiday, Choi has no solid plans for what her next film will be; right now she’s finishing up work on another film’s post-production as a hired hand and not really thinking beyond that. Chances are, however, it will be a film about messy women who don’t fit the mould. 

Girlfriends opens on March 5.