Hong Kong Girls Rebel: Riley Yip’s New Feature

When director Riley Yip Yuk-ying was doing auditions for her feature debut, Blossoms Under Somewhere (寄了一整個春天), she remembers actor Sheena Chan Shu-yan being perplexed. “[She] asked me, ‘Why am I taking these off here?’” recalls Yip. In the scene, a character strips off her underwear and dances around an elite girls’ school assembly hall, proudly swinging them over her head. Yip explained to the auditioner that not only did the character have to prove to a potential buyer she was, in fact, in high school, but that it was a moment of liberation and rebellion. “This is where you take assembly. This is where you listen to all the Bible teaching. And that’s why you want to take off your underpants, because you want to swing them to Jesus,” Yip finishes with a laugh, waving her hand around to demonstrate.

Ching Hui (Marf Yau Yin-tung) and Rachel Ho (Sheena Chan Shu-yan) in Blossoms Under Somewhere, a film by Riley Yip – Photo courtesy MM2

It’s not Yip’s intention to be confrontational or disrespectful. That’s not the point of the film, though she’s ready for a bit of moral outrage if early preview screenings are to be believed. “There were people who hated the film,” she says, eyes widening and shaking her head in disbelief. “They didn’t dislike it. They hated, hated, hated it,” she stresses. That was far from the case at the film’s local premiere at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival. That crowd was buoyant, the cast seemed moderately bemused at the positive reception – even if producer Fruit Chan seemed wholly unsurprised. The hate, when looked at from a certain point of view, could be a badge of honour. After all, Blossoms is a film about young women pushing beyond the boundaries of what’s accepted of them and finding their own moral lodestar. It’s also about how hard communication can be sometimes, and finding ways to make yourself heard. Notably, it’s the second First Feature Film Initiative (FFFI) project to hit screens in as many months that’s accessible and optimistic, after Stuntman. Whether that’s a sign the programme is starting to take chances on less “serious” material remains to be seen. But Blossoms is a bright, sunny, colourful dramedy with a happy ending that takes change in stride. That makes it an outlier these days.

“When people leave the cinema, first of all, I want them to be happy,” says Yip. “And then if they feel any kind of connection in the movie at all, then I would like it to be that you have every right to express yourself. And if you’re struggling to do it one way, find another.”

Yip frequently refers to her own difficulty articulating what’s on her mind, though it’s clear from Blossoms plenty is: absent parents, a social structure that demands their absenteeism, our reliance on digital communications, continuing double standards for how women should behave. It’s what took her to filmmaking – in a roundabout way.

“That’s a funny story,” she begins dryly, getting comfortable on a sofa in distributor MM2’s Tsim Sha Tsui office. Many years ago, while still a film and television student at Baptist University, Yip had ambitions to be a pilot. “But Cathay had a minimum height requirement of 160 centimetres,” she says, pausing for a beat. “I’m 159.” After washing out of the pilot training and graduating in 2012, Yip found herself working as a screenwriter at HKTV, the shopping platform that spun off from the failed television station, and then on Steve Chan’s Weeds on Fire in 2016. 

Weeds was also an FFFI film, so Yip wrote her first script and applied for a grant. That was a bust. “I’m quitting this movie thing, and I’m going to get a pilot’s licence,” she decided. In the interim a new Airbus aircraft design meant the height requirement had been revised down to 158 centimetres. Yip, however, missed the training application deadline. In one final coincidence, a filmmaker friend told her about new programmes at FFFI. “And I thought, let’s have one more go before I get a pilot’s licence.”

Yip and co-writer Sze Ling-ling spent the three years after winning a grant in 2020 getting the script right, which to Fruit Chan’s eyes was a snail’s pace. Baptist connected the two, but Yip admits to being a touch intimidated by the indie giant, a filmmaker she has admired since she saw his film Made in Hong Kong. The two clicked professionally, though; Chan gave Yip all the creative freedom she could want while always being ready with support, insight and filmmaking wisdom. “He was a tremendous help – go deeper with this, elaborate more on that,” she says. “People like these things, they don’t like those. That was my weakness, because honestly? I’m a writer. I have very shallow ideas about how to actually make movies.” 

At its purest, Blossoms Under Somewhere is a classic coming-of-age story about two girlfriends — Ching Hui (Marf Yau Yin-tung) and Rachel Ho (Sheena Chan Shu-yan) — attending St Lina’s, a not so subtle reference to prestigious, missionary-founded schools like Ying Wa. They are learning to navigate the world on their own terms with considerable challenges, at least in Ching’s case: she has a stutter. Ching practically lives alone. Her parents are never seen and her constant companion at home is her pet turtle. Rachel is similarly unsupervised, and together they hatch a scheme to sell their used underwear online — starting at HK$400 per item — to the city’s panty-sniffing fetishists.

“One of the reasons I picked this subject matter is because it’s very controversial,” states Yip. “You can’t say it’s right or wrong. It’s not illegal. It’s just trade.” That even-handedness runs throughout Blossoms; Yip and Sze’s script never judges its characters. Yip cites Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird as a touchstone, and the film of Giuseppe Tornatore, particularly Cinema Paradiso, but American indie filmmaker Sean Baker’s forthcoming Anora is more tonally in lockstep with Blossoms (if more explicit). As Rachel says again and again, they’re just customers.

“I find it funny when people say, ‘Oh, this is so unhygienic. There’s a lot of bacteria on underwear.’ Yet they go watch the football match, a basketball match, and watch people fight over a smelly, sweaty shirt some guy in the NBA wore. Those go online and sell for 1,000 times the price of Ching’s panties. But that’s not disgusting.” Yip scoffs. “The only difference is the shirt you wear out for people to see. The others you wear inside and people don’t.” The other difference of course is that one is dominated by men, the other by women. Blossoms balances its unapologetic girliness with feminist agency — Ching and Rachel act, they don’t react — and in doing so gives us two of the most fully realised female characters in Hong Kong cinema this year. 

Over the course of the school year, Ching wades into the dodgy waters of romance when a regular patron, university science professor Gabriel Lau (Adam Pak Tin-nam), reaches out for an in-person meeting. At the same time, she strikes up an odd friendship with her regular courier, Ben Lam (Shin Cheung). Ching’s stutter becomes a metaphor for communicating and connecting, as well as for the ways we are all increasingly clumsy when it comes to talking to someone in a grocery store, but have no trouble speaking up under the cloak of digital media anonymity. Ching can barely get a sentence out during a phone call with her absent mother, but can text at lightning speed. Again, Yip refuses to judge, acknowledging times are changing and will continue to change. She admits a certain nostalgia for the days of hanging out in a bar with friends and meeting new people that way, but “I’m not judging. I just want to look at where we are now, at this moment in society.”

The young cast goes a long way to making Blossoms an engaging peek behind the youthful curtain. Everyone, including star Yau, a graduate of ViuTV’s King Maker, the same reality competition that birthed MIRROR and current member of Cantopop girl group COLLAR, auditioned in a standard casting call for their roles, which explains the relatively thin resumes. Australian-born Pak turned up in the Breakout Brothers trilogy, and had a small part in A Guilty Conscience, and Cheung turned up in a television series (Left on Road) in 2023. Sheena Chan appeared in Norris Wong’s The Lyricist Wannabe. Despite Yau’s lead status, Chan’s Rachel is arguably the more critical character. 

“I’m really happy I found her. We spent over two months looking for Rachel,” says Yip. “We looked at every single actor we thought might be able to do 17 and none were quite right. Many were just too shy and they didn’t have that ‘thing’ Rachel has. Rachel is bold.” 

Chan was still studying drama at Baptist when Yip contacted her after seeing her in a music video by a Taiwanese singer. “She started off a bit timid too, but after I told her about the story, the symbol of authority the hall is, she got it,” says Yip. Ching and Rachel run the gauntlet of teenaged dramas, betrayals and forgiveness expected of the coming-of-age story, but Yau, Chan and Yip make them easy to root for. “It took a long time for me to find an angle for to how to tell this story,” says Yip. “I have a lot of things to say, but I don’t always know how to say them.” 

Blossoms’ memorable closing frames suggest otherwise, which means Yip can probably continue developing her next script – and she can give up on that pilot’s license. “Well,” she cracks. “We’ll see how this goes.”

Blossoms Under Somewhere is tentatively scheduled to open in November.