Hong Kong Motherhood Gets the Big Screen Treatment

Actors Hedwig Tam Sin-yin and Lo Chun-yip are sitting in the screening room at the office of Montages of a Modern Motherhood distributor Golden Scene. Lo looks like the schoolteacher he played in Nick Cheuk’s Time Still Turns the Pages, decked out in a cardigan and blue dress shirt. Tam is a little more glammed up in a cool black and white patterned dress complemented by impeccable styling. Whatever the case, neither looks like the frazzled, slightly overwhelmed new parents they play in Oliver Chan Siu-kuen’s follow-up to her acclaimed 2020 debut Still Human.

Montages has been making waves since its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival last October, followed by screenings in Tokyo and Dubai ahead of a gala presentation at home at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. The short summary of Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不) is that it’s about a woman, Jing (Tam), struggling with the demands of family, which includes her husband Wai (Lo), and society as she navigates her new life as a mother. In reality, Chan’s film is also about the clash between tradition and modernity, loss of autonomy, feelings of isolation, postpartum depression, gender roles and the conflict between resentment and joy – all subjects we refuse to really address as communities and societies. 

Ironically, Montages isn’t as personal as one might think, despite Chan indeed having a son, now five years old. “My inspiration was actually cases where mothers just couldn’t take it anymore, and hurt themselves or their kids,” says Chan. “When I was writing [Jing] I put in some little details, but it’s not entirely my own experience. I wanted to make the film because of all the challenges and unexpected changes in my life.” She admits that she was just as quick to criticise women who made the news for the wrong reasons until she could suddenly relate to them.

Montages comes on the heels of three movies touching on similar themes: Jason Reitman’s 2018 Tully, starring Charlize Theron as a stressed out mother of three who finds respite with her new, enigmatic nanny; Marielle Heller’s 2024 Nightbitch, with Amy Adams as a new stay-at-home mom with a novel coping mechanism; and this year’s buzzy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You by Mary Bronstein, a pitch black Silver Bear-winning comedy about a woman (Rose Byrne) with a sick infant whose life collapses. Chan adds Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love to the growing list of films about struggling moms, expected later this year. 

“Until recently we haven’t had many directors working who are also mothers, and as the number of female directors grows, so does the number of stories from female perspectives,” she says. “While we’ve found opportunities to have careers too, women are still the primary caretakers of our children – because of the traditional family structures, or lingering gender roles, whatever. We feel the pain. That’s why we’ve kind of collectively started to talk about it. We don’t talk about it enough, and there’s a gap in the market.” 

Add to that the “mother” in film is still too often portrayed as either a one-dimensional, gentle housekeeper or a horror character and Chan decided the time was right to put a real mother on screens and give her a real voice. In Montages, Jing and Wai are living in the home of his parents (played by Janis Pang Hang-ying and Tai Bo), which they think gives them the right to micromanage Jing’s life. She wants to get back to her baking job, which she manages after connecting with a sympathetic neighbour, Fanny (Alice Fung So-bo), at least for a short time. 

Chan’s script layers one challenge on top of the next to make us feel as suffocated and frustrated as Jing, and immerses us in the stress with persistent crying on the soundtrack. It’s an audacious piece of filmmaking that could be alienating if it weren’t so empathetic, made particularly vivid in a quiet moment when Jing asks why things are this way with her mother (Patra Au Ga-man, All Shall Be Well).

Chan, Tam and Lo have been moving in the same industry space for many years, crossing paths on various graduation projects, short films, docs and Indies. Chan studied cinema at Baptist University and Lo did likewise at City University, and started their careers around the same time in the mid-2000s; they attended Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2015 as directors, and Lo started to dabble in acting as a way to help out friends and fellow students making their first films. Tam was also cutting her teeth in shorts around the same time. Both won their roles through open auditions, both impressing Chan with deeper interpretations of the characters, even at that stage. 

Notably — and perhaps ironically — neither Tam nor Lo is married or has children, yet both received well-earned nominations from the Hong Kong Film Awards (to be announced on April 27) for their lived-in, textured performances. Tam is largely a self-taught actor who learnt from experience. She took a few performance classes but really just dove into the industry head first, landing her first role after an open casting call for Chan Chi-fat’s Weeds On Fire. Tilda Swinton is a touchstone for Tam, though she declares, “There can never be another [Swinton], so I would never try and emulate her.” But she does look to Japanese actor Sakura Ando (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters) and Korean Jeon Do-yeon (Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine) as loose role models. Similar to those three actors, Tam has managed to toggle between moderately indie fare, like Anselm Chan’s Ready or Knot and Hong Kong Family, and more commercial films like I Did It My Way.

Tam admits to early concerns about being believable as a young mother, so she spent a lot of time talking to women who were. (She even stayed at actor Jennifer Yu’s house overnight with Yu’s newborn.) She also thought quite a bit about her own mother, revisiting memories from her childhood. “A lot of the dialogue in the film really rang true for me,” she says. “I found it familiar; it sounded like something I’d heard in my life.” The biggest challenge was balancing the feeling of adoring your child – but also hating them.

In some ways, Lo had the more difficult job in the film. As a new father and overworked delivery driver, Lo had to strike a three-way balance between oblivious, selfish and well-intentioned. It would be easy to make his character Wai the villain, but in his mind he’s doing the right thing. 

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but this kind of man is actually very, very common in Hong Kong,” Lo says sheepishly to a room dominated by women. The comment gets a laugh, but Lo’s only partially joking. “He’s the kind of man that’s self-righteous, with a lot of opinions, a lot of reasoning, but never sees the other side of the relationship. Hong Kong is a place where we always talk about efficiency, so it doesn’t allow room for discussion of anything else.” By that Lo means child care and equality in the home, but also space for introspection. “In the film, he’s a delivery driver who has to eat lunch in his cab in 15 minutes. There’s no time or pace for anything else.” 

Wai may not be the most likeable character in the film, but Lo makes him real, and makes us understand his decisions – even if we don’t agree. Lo doesn’t really aspire to any actor’s performance style, but, he says, “I do want to be a part of projects that are meaningful and moving,” citing Edward Yang’s humanist films about the middle class (A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi) as just one example. It has led him to work on Heiward Mak’s first short, with Derek Chiu on No. 1 Chung Ying Street, and to direct his own films: 21 Years After, Paradox and Days After N Coming. That said, were he offered a big cheque for a part in a flashy action movie, “I wouldn’t say no,” he admits with a chuckle.

Despite Chan’s prior success, she met with a fair amount of resistance to Montages when it came to funding. “When I was seeking investment there were a lot of turn downs,” she says. She was told that no one cared about the topic, that audiences wanted something happy and that the target audience — mothers — was too busy taking care of children to go to the movies. 

Chan is unsure what to expect come opening day beyond polarised responses, but at the very least, the film is a conversation starter. It doesn’t offer up any answers to the questions it poses about the pressures we collectively put on mothers, and its ambiguous ending has had audiences talking since its premiere, which is exactly what Chan had hoped for.

For his part, Lo hopes the film can “make space for challenging traditional gender roles,” he says. “There are difficulties in that for cultural and systemic reasons, but we need to look at whether old traditions can cater to new life and new family needs.” 

Tam hopes it will strip mothers of their anonymity and make us all see them as human. “Mothers aren’t perfect, and the bigger question is ‘Why do they have to be?’” she says. “It’s that kind of stereotype that we are trying to break. Women who are mothers shouldn’t feel so alone and they shouldn’t blame themselves when they do.” She pauses. “We wanted it to feel like a reassuring hug to new moms.”

Chan is a little more succinct. “This is very much dedicated to whatever choice women want to make about their bodies, whether they have kids or not,” she says. “Just respect that. Having a kid is really difficult in modern days, and if you’re not going to help, if you’re not part of her village, please shut up.”

Montages of a Modern Motherhood screens at the 2025 Hong Kong International Film Festival on April 12 and April 13 with Chan in attendance. It opens in cinemas on April 24.

Zolima CityMag is a media partner of Hong Kong International Film Festival