Meet Hong Kong’s Newest, Youngest Film Directing Duo

Filmmakers Antonio Tam Sin-yeung and Jeffrey Lam Sen have a disturbing ability to make the people around them feel old. It’s not intentional and it’s not mean-spirited. It’s more like a side effect of the generational resonance of cinema. Seated in Golden Scene’s boardroom, Tam, 26, and Lam, 29, recall their earliest brushes with the movies, and what put them on a path to making them. Tam cites seeing Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull in secondary school, and recognising his feelings for its main character, Jake La Motta, transform as the film went on. “This is the magic of empathy,” he recalls thinking. “How you can I hate this character but still feel so much empathy for him. That was the moment I wanted to be a director.”

Lam’s less dramatic early brushes with film came with regular trips to the movies with his parents. Like Tam, he was in secondary school when he suddenly realised that there were directors behind the movies he liked. “It would have been Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight,” he says. “I loved superhero movies, but that one was unique within the genre. Back then I still went to church, and it had a book corner with some movies [to borrow], and because I was interested in film I discovered old movies there.”

Old movies like? “Seven by David Fincher,” he replies. That’s from 1995. An awkward silence precedes some loud guffaws. Their youth belies Tam and Lam’s breezy old married coupled dynamic. They’re quick to banter and joke, but are thoughtful when contemplating faith, organised religion and the fundamental concept of forgiveness, all of which are at the heart of their debut, Valley of the Shadow of Death (不赦之罪). 

Shared background

30 minutes into a rambling conversation, the film’s co-star, Cantopop group P1X3L member George Au Chun-hoi, also 26, swoops into the room, looking every bit the rock star in a leather jacket and chunky jewellery. As unassuming as Tam and Lam are boisterous, Au baffles at the label. He’s on a mini-break from music, happily exploring acting and getting away from the pop idol arena, which he refers to as “a little more about external packaging. I prefer the internal,” he says. “There are similarities, and I like both because they involve interpreting, or reinterpreting, material.”

Lam and Tam both attended the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), where they often crossed paths at cinemas where they actually watched movies. Lam graduated from the HKAPA in 2018 and started working as an actor in Nate Ki’s Back Home and Lee Cheuk-ban’s G Affairs, all while making his own short films, The End and Grace in 2020, both for the Fresh Wave competition. The script for Valley started life as Tam’s 2021 HKAPA graduation project, one his instructor, Table for Six screenwriter Sunny Chan, thought was strong enough to produce as a feature. 

It was Chan that reconnected Tam with Lam after serving on the Fresh Wave jury and seeing Lam’s shorts. He also put them together because of their shared backgrounds: both were raised in Christian homes that cautioned — but never discouraged — them about the dodgy film business. Lam’s dad is a pastor and a model for the characters in his shorts. They dove into each other’s work and saw the connection almost immediately. Nonetheless Lam still points out his dad is not the pastor in Valley. 

“This story was totally created by Antonio,” he stresses. 

“But based on your father,” Tam tosses in with a laugh.

Religion and morality

Valley of the Shadow of Death pivots on the relationship between the grieving Pastor Leung (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) and the young ex-convict, Ah Lok (Au, who emerged from ViuTV’s King Maker II), who Leung believes was responsible for his daughter’s suicide after being raped. The story begins with Leung and his nurse wife (Louisa So Yuk-wah, The Sparring Partner) glumly celebrating what would have been the birthday of their daughter ChingChing (Sheena Chan Shu-yan, Blossoms Under Somewhere). A short while later, Ah Lok wanders into Leung’s Church of Faith and Love, slightly lost and in need of social, economic and spiritual guidance. Knowing who Ah Lok is, Leung takes him under his wing. The rest of the story revolves around Leung’s internal struggle to balance his religious beliefs with his urge for some kind of revenge; his wife’s instinct to never forgive, and Ah Lok’s own efforts at redemption and to understand and forgive ChingChing, the murkiest quagmire of all. 

The film is one of contrasts — crime and punishment, memory and reality, faith and science — and betrayal. “There’s a scene when Ah Lok finds out that the pastor knows who he is. He thought he’d found someone who was willing to help him,” says Au. “When he finds out who Leung is there’s a strong sense of betrayal. That was a challenge.” 

The film also demands that we ask ourselves who has the right to grant forgiveness, and whether there’s a line in the sand that won’t allow it. (The title in Chinese translates to “unforgivable sin.”) It’s no spoiler to say Ah Lok is ChingChing’s rapist, a factor Tam thought long and hard about during the writing process and fully understanding that audiences could read it wrong. A late plot development reframes every single character, including ChingChing, and muddies the moral waters even more – which was Tam’s point. “Of course we were afraid of writing a rape. It’s risky. What if I deliver the wrong message?” says Tam. “If I had written it as a murder it would be easier to accept. People want perfect victims, and if they hate my message maybe they can ask themselves why they’re blaming the victim.”

What is forgiveness?

In addition to thorny cinematic meditations on faith, justice and forgiveness like Paul Schrader’s First Reformed and Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Tam was inspired by news he heard of a terrorist bombing incident, and a pastor who came out begging forgiveness for the bomber, the logic being that God is loving and forgiving. The idea was compounded by a conversation he overheard at a church function, in which the pastor who’d just preached loving your enemy was talking about someone he hated.

“I was shocked when I read [about the bombing], because I thought this ‘great love’ betrayed humanity,” says Tam. “It was a bit too much for me. How can this love be so unreasonable? So I looked into it and in most religions, forgiveness is about helping yourself or coming closer to God. But the Bible is about love. I’d been listening to these teachings since I was three but I never really thought about them.”

The conflicting messages laid the groundwork for Valley, which spoke to Lam in the wake of his own spiritual crisis. Though what you could call a lapsed Christian, as the son of a pastor Lam started attending church as a child, and went on a mission as a teen. After returning to Hong Kong, he heard one of his fellow missionaries had been involved in a sexual assault. “Although I’ve left [the church], religion is part of my life, and the eternal struggle between faith and humanity attracted me,” says Lam. “Should [that person] be forgiven? Can we practise what we preach? It’s an unsolvable dilemma.” Valley of the Shadow of Death interrogates how we reconcile these clashing human urges, for the devout and the secular alike.

A new source of funding

It’s a heady topic, to be sure. And at a time when producers worldwide are increasingly risk-averse, Tam’s script was a hard sell. Nonetheless, the duo found a producer in Jacqueline Liu at One Cool, thanks to Chan, and it was Liu who shopped the script to a few funders, landing on an alternative to the usual First Feature Film Initiative. As one of the first two projects funded by the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers’ Keep Rolling Keep Running programme, launched in 2022, Valley was granted a HK$4.2 million budget.

Production began in January 2024, but in December 2023 Lam and Tam still had no actor for Ah Lok. “I considered doing it myself,” says Lam, “but [Antonio] was very against it.” He glances at Tam, who immediately quips, “I spent years on this script.”

Eventually, Au won the role in an open casting call. Everyone understood that casting a pop star with a clean cut image could throw up more hurdles, but Lam liked the idea of confronting audiences with the unexpected, and for his part, Au was happy to make a film debut with an unsavoury character.

“My family is Buddhist, but I don’t personally hold any religious beliefs,” he says. “When I read the script I was very intrigued by the idea of humanity versus religion. [Ah Lok] is trying to find absolution through the exploration of religion, so I used that as a [gateway] to the character itself. At this stage of my career I don’t want to limit myself to a specific kind of character.” To his credit, Au turns in a nuanced performance and holds his own with Wong and offers no easy answers, like the film itself. 

Neither Tam nor Lam are pondering their next moves; Lam has a full time job to concentrate on after Valley of the Shadow of Death opens. It remains to be seen whether or not they become Hong Kong’s own directing duo à la the Russo brothers (known for The Avengers: Endgame) or partners Lord and Miller (The Lego Movie), but they’re not ruling out collaborating again. Tam, for his part, plans to get back to writing. He’s leaning towards a comedy. “I want to make something my mom can watch.”

Valley of the Shadow of Death opens in cinemas on June 5.

All stills are provided by Golden Scene