True Love, A Raw Look at Relationships Shot Entirely on an iPhone

“I’m curious about a Western woman’s opinion, really,” says Fruit Chan as he settles into his seat at what’s effectively a around table discussion of his latest film as a producer, True Love, For Once in My Life (淺淺歲月), a decades-spanning drama about a Hong Kong woman whose marriage collapses in divorce. “I want to know what’s your angle, because in Asia a lot of men are very…” He  trails off, which allows the film’s star, Cecilia Yip Tung, sitting across from him, to interject. 

“It’s not an Asian man thing, it’s global,” she chides. She’s not angry. She just wants it known the film’s subject is a universal one.

Chan and Yip are joined at the table by director Delon Siu Koon-ho, who didn’t approach the material in his feature debut with a gendered perspective, opting to “look at it like a bigger umbrella of love,” he says. Chan asks Yip, a movie star since the 1980s, if True Love is the first time she’s worked on as a non-studio production. She mentions helping out on student films and shorts, but Chan argues that’s not commercial work for theatres, which Yip has another response to.

“Well, neither is this,” she quips. All three look sheepishly at the distributor who is also at the table before letting loose some hearty laughter. 

True Love, For Once in My Life is based on the semi-autobiographical book by executive producer and novelist Sabrina Tse Shuk-fun, who pitched Chan about adapting it for film. True Love, whose title in Chinese translates roughly to “the shallow years,” begins with Sabrina (Yip) and her husband Andrew (fellow acting veteran Tse Kwan-ho, most recently seen in Table for Six 2 and Cesium Fallout) learning to navigate a marriage in which he spends most of his time in mainland China for work. The constant separation and his infidelity leads to divorce, and another son for Andrew and his eventual second wife. Despite her sudden untethered life, Sabrina moves on alone, makes an awkward peace with her adult children (Hui Yuet-sheung and Himmy Wong Ting-him) and finally retires. But when Andrew comes back to Hong Kong for treatment for a terminal illness, Sabrina re-enters his life to care for him until the end. She has to: Andrew was her once-in-a-lifetime soulmate. 

Chan met with Tse but was inclined to reject the script, co-written with Lou Shiu-wa (Hong Kong Family, “Headmaster” in Septet), citing the fact that he personally didn’t believe in the idea of one true love, as well as the hoary, old-fashioned nature of the story. “Are we still doing this kind of thing?” he asks with a shrug. But he reconsidered precisely because we’re still doing this kind of thing. “There are many different types of people, with many different types of beliefs. Who am I to say they’re wrong?” he says. The key for Chan was to find a way to tell it that was fresh, and that avoided what he calls “additive” storytelling; the “more is more” approach to filmmaking he considers conventional. He in turn pitched art director and writer Siu, with whom he’d worked with for years, most recently on the 2021 horror anthology Tales from the Occult. 

Siu had the same reaction: it’s been done before. But Siu was more of a romantic. “We’ve all seen movies about the deterioration of a marriage, but I read the script and I was kind of moved by the idea of a true love, especially in this day and age, as something that’s difficult to find,” he says.

True Love recalls fracturing relationship films as diverse as Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), John Cassavetes’s influential cinéma vérité-style Faces (1968) and A Married Couple, Allan King’s actual vérité 1969 documentary. Siu admits Baumbach’s film was a guidepost, but like Chan, he was more interested in breaking new ground for filmmaking processes and form in Hong Kong. That’s when the film’s visual solution presented itself. Principal photography for True Love would exclusively use iPhones, a first for production in the city. Mobile phone tech is already a legitimate creative choice, and directors have been exploiting the small, flexible, cost-effective option for years, among them Oscar nominees Sean Baker (Tangerine) and Steven Soderbergh (Unsane), and Alex Garland on the high-profile 28 Years Later, scheduled for release later this year.

“Marriage Story has similarities with the story that we’re telling, which is about a modern marriage without a happy ending,” says Siu. “How do you present that institution without the happy ending? The iPhone gave us the ability to look more true to life. It does have a documentary feel to it; the audience is almost a fly on the wall looking at the events in a slightly voyeuristic way.” 

Siu  created a visual language that puts Sabrina and Andrew’s relationship in a larger context. In the first act, when they’re together, Siu uses a series of wide shots, which get tighter and tighter as the years go by. “I wanted the picture to represent how one looks at one’s own life,” he says. “When you’re younger, you look at it in more general terms, and then you focus more closely on what’s important at the end. We used just the phone without any accessories on it. We wanted to use it like normal people do. I would definitely call this an experiment, especially for the actors. It’s one of the things that made this such an interesting project and experience.” 

The result is a raw, unvarnished portrait that’s jarring in its anti-gloss aesthetic in the first few minutes — Chan admits to tinkering with the colour correction after early screenings — but one that slowly draws you in emotionally. That’s thanks to Yip in the lead.

The mobile phone made Siu’s work easy and exciting, but the process was a minor challenge for Yip, an industry veteran and legitimate movie star. She’s been a fixture in television series and as a host since her 1982 breakout in Patrick Tam’s Nomad, later Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage and all the way up to Oliver Chan’s Still Human. Yip was sold on the story for the technical challenge but more for the role for a woman her age – a rarity in cinema anywhere.

“This interested me because it’s told from a woman’s point of view, which is still rare in the Hong Kong film industry,” she explains. “Divorce impacts women differently, and the story itself applies to so many local people. I found it resonant. I see Sabrina as very strong, and I think she loves herself more than anyone else. She loves her family and husband, of course, but I think her dignity is more important to her.” Yip’s layered performance makes Sabrina frustrating, admirable, melancholy and joyful in turns, but it took some work. The lack of traditional rigging, filters and tracks demanded a different type of performance from her.

“If the camera is the eye, I couldn’t sense it so I didn’t know where my angle was, but everything seemed simpler and more casual. It was like we were shooting a hidden camera documentary,” says Yip. “So I had to switch up my thinking and not come to this as drama. It was a document of my life. Just like that I got more natural in a way. I was more focused on my partner, my colleagues, than on the camera.”

True Love is undeniably an outlier among recent Hong Kong releases, even the ones that have been narratively (Last Song for You) or thematically (The Last Dance) ambitious. Despite the hand-wringing over the lacklustre Lunar New Year box office performance (down 37 percent from 2024), audiences are nonetheless responding to local films more and more; receipts for Hong Kong films rose five percent in 2024. True Love will test the mood for stylistic ambition. 

“I have no box office expectations. This is not a mainstream movie,” Chan declares, once again making the distributor squirm. “How audiences react to a movie is not why I make movies, especially ones like this, about very basic life subjects — birth, marriage, love, death — which are oftentimes the most difficult. Like I said, it’s an experiment, so quality is not the main concern. Creative storytelling is.” 

Siu agrees. “The value of a movie is not in box office performance,” he says. “We have a novel filming method and a good, professional actor. That’s value right there. We weren’t thinking about box office. You can’t.”

Yip is more optimistic, recalling positive, very emotional reactions from its premiere at the Pingyao International Film Festival in September, and at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival in November. “This movie is very different from other local movies,” she says. “It’s not calculated. The first time I saw it was in a regular screening and people were weeping, and laughing, and really involved. I think they saw similarities in their own lives. It’s very special, and I think maybe it could be a dark horse.”

Our collective fascination with failing marriages could connect with viewers, despite colour correction and the film’s raw quality. Siu rightly points out sad songs about heartbreak are often enduring favourites; tragedy is among the oldest forms of drama. Yip theorises that our inward looking nature makes stories like True Love linger. Chan, of course, is more cynical, and after letting loose a chuckle puts it succinctly. “We like schadenfreude,” he says.

True Love, For Once in My Life opens March 7, 2025 in Hong Kong