In chime with our times: Kit Hung

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Entertainment
3 Jun 2009
In chime with our times: Kit Hungby Nigel Collett
Fridae meets Kit Hung, director of the award winning film, Soundless Wind Chime, which will hit Hong Kong screens in the summer, followed by cinemas in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Ideas drive Wing Kit Hung, old ideas, cuttingedge ideas, concepts refracted by images that give birth to newreflections. He’s fascinated by weaving different things together,traditional Chinese thought, maybe, with the electronic cultures thathold sway across the net, and by juxtaposing things that are ordinaryin their own setting, bringing them together to make themextraordinary. He is always a director with a message, a film makervery much in keeping with the times.

                               
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Kit Hung

So when I met him for tea at the Fringe Club in Hong Kong (he drankaerated water to my coffee), to discuss his career and his new film, Soundless Wind Chime(无声风铃), we soon got into philosophy, myth, activism and socialpolitics. But before jumping in too deep here, let me put Kit incontext for those who have yet to have the pleasure of seeing his work.Many of us will know him as one of Hong Kong’s three prominent makersof films with gay themes (the others being Simon Chung and Scud) andthe director of 2001’s award-winning I Am Not What You Want.

Kitwas born and educated in Hong Kong, taking his first degree in Designat the Polytechnic University before turning his back on a commerciallife and launching into film. At the Poly U, he was lucky enough to betaught Hong Kong culture by Yau Ching, a Hong Kong LGBT activist andwriter who helped his personal breakthrough both in terms of the way hecould fit his gay sexual orientation into Hong Kong society and of whathe wanted to do with his life. The University allowed him to make a35-minute film as his graduation project. This, actually his secondfilm (the first was In My Space of Loneliness, his ownfeelings about his then boyfriend collected into a five-minute short,made with his own video camera in 1999), was entitled [:nv:s:b/e peop/e]and was a film exploring human communications in cyber space. Its twocharacters, Moon and Sue, never speak, just type text to each other,yet connect so strongly to each other and to others in Hong Kong thatthe film concludes with the Moon God’s red ribbons linking the entirecity. Made in 2000, the film was shown at the Transmediale Festival inBerlin and was successful enough to encourage Kit to go on, which hedid the next year with I Am Not What You Want, a phenomenallysuccessful movie which held 2nd place for 11 weeks in HMV’s video salesand was shown at a large number of international festivals, winning theSpecial Jury Prize at the Festival ‘De Drake’ in Belgium.

I Am Not What You Wantbroke the mould in more than sales. Much of its popularity can be putdown to the simplicity and charm of the very innocent love affair itshows developing between two very ‘normal’ New Territories boys. It isan infectiously joyous film in which gay love is drawn just like anyother and which has, for once, a happy ending. Audiences, straight andgay, warmed to it.

“Hong Kong is desperate for this kind ofrealistic representation of normal gay life,” Kit told me. “My ambitionwas to make it so ordinary, and I got a lot of comments like ‘I’m notgay, but I like the film’ so I think I succeeded in getting across tomainstream society the idea that gay life isn’t different and that gaypeople shouldn’t feel isolated.” This worked even for his mother, whohad hardly talked to him for the six years since he’d come out; thefilm includes a scene based on what had happened at Kit’s home wherethe family sit in embarrassed silence throughout dinner. When she sawthe scene, his mother telephoned him in Chicago and told him sheunderstood and that she knew now that he’d really achieved something.

                               
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Screenshots from Soundless Wind Chime

Kit’s mother could not have ignored his sexual orientation. He came outat school at the age of 19, where he’d always known of his differencefrom most of his classmates, to whom he was a bit of a ‘sissy’. He wasthen exposed to the very camp atmosphere of Metro Broadcast radio,where he worked part time. A search on Yahoo for ‘Gay Hong Kong’ tookhim to a university where for the first time he met a lot of other tongzhi.Kit now embraced his sexuality and threw himself into gay activism. Atthe Polytechnic University, he was cofounder of the ‘Gay and LesbianOrientation Camp’ which gathered over a hundred university studentstogether in the country in 1997, as well as a committee member of theJoint University Queer Union, where he met Kenneth Cheung and Tommy Jaiand which was the foundation for what later became Rainbow Hong Kong,the LGBT drop in centre and activist group in Kowloon. Later, inChicago, Kit founded the first Queer Film Festival at the School of ArtInstitute, a one-off six-day celebration of gay and lesbian film.

Kit was in Chicago due to the success of I Am Not What You Want,which won him a scholarship to study for a MFA in Studio at the Schoolof Art Institute of Chicago. Here, Kit made the 38-minute short Buffering,a story examining long distance relationships and linking technologyand the ordinary world, featuring Hong Kong singer-song writer ChetLam. This won plaudits at film festivals worldwide, including in Turin,and secured him invitations to the Berlin film festival’s BerlinaleTalent Campus in 2003 and 2004, a melting pot of European film talentthat brought him many of the contacts that he has been able to workwith until today. He also began work on Soundless Wind Chime,though this took many years to bring to fruition. Initially, this was aproject involving both Kit and a lesbian friend. They separately wrotealternate scenes involving a lesbian and a gay couple, each allowingthe other to continue the tale. Sadly, his partner dropped out,depressed by the difficulty of interesting commercial backers in themovie and taking her lesbian stories with her, leaving Kit alone withhis gay characters and the struggle to complete the film.

In themeantime, Kit found himself in Switzerland, home of the German Swisswho became and remains his partner. It was a base from which hecontinued to develop his own style in half a dozen music videos forrecording artists from China, Hong Kong (Chet Lam and Kelly Cha) andSwitzerland (the popular Swiss singer- song writer, Signorino TJ) andan opening short for the Amsterdam Film Festival. What links all thesepieces is the desire, both of Kit and of artists like Chet Lam withwhom he works, to break moulds and to escape the clutches of thecommercial hardcore. “I use hi-tech methods to create something raw,touchy” he says. “Especially for Signorino TJ, I developed a style likethe Monty Python cartoons, which he had introduced to me.” He also madevisuals for a Liverpool-based film company for two children’s theatreproductions in Switzerland; this too, mixed multi-media elements intothe form of a TV game involving ten characters played by three peoplewearing masks, typically for Kit linking techniques both ancient andnew.

All the time, though, Kit was pulling together the script, finance and cast for Soundless Wind Chime.The project received new motivation in Switzerland, where Kit’spartner’s parents both died within a short space of time and Kit foundhimself wanting to talk to the dead as though they were still there.So, he wrote new parts of the film, parts which form its heart, toresolve the issues which faced him; issues of loss, of dealing withgrief, of the denial and the need for final acceptance of death.Rebirth features, in a semi-Buddhist sense and in the reincarnation ofa dead person in the form of another who looks the same, maybe is thesame, but has no memory of any former life and so can never be the sameperson. Western viewers may miss some of this on first viewing (forinstance the old couple and the young boy parting at the start of thefilm recalls, to those who know the Chinese story, the old woman whogives the about-to-be reborn soul its soup of forgetfulness before itcrosses the bridge to this world). Inevitably, almost all will missmany of the personal references in this film. Yet the scenes arisingfrom Kit’s own experiences in Switzerland, the old Chinese womandancing, the girl playing the violin, all fit seamlessly into thesurrealist atmosphere of the country he recreates.

“I alsowanted to show an inter-racial relationship like my own,” Kit adds,“something that was part of me. There are so few shows which show this.I can think only of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Simon Chung’s Innocentthat do this well. It needs a lot of sensitivity to describe this.” Thetwo leading actors are both outsiders, one a mainland Chinese the otherSwiss. Lu Yulai plays a poor Chinese restaurant worker recently arrivedin Hong Kong and Bernhard Bulling has two roles, as Pascal, a vagabondSwiss thieving for a meagre living in Hong Kong, and Ueli, hisreincarnation (or doppel gänger, perhaps), a gentleshopkeeper in rural Switzerland. The first two characters are alsooutsiders, the third is cut off from his family through grief. All canscarcely communicate in words, hence the title, for the very realcommunication that eventually leads to love between the characters isby means other than sounds, chimes singing from the soul, far moreeffective than mere vocal chords. Pascal dies and maybe is, maybeisn’t, resurrected as Ueli, but how is not important to these themes.Again, Kit breaks stereotypes and, through subconscious linkages,surprises and persuades his audience.

Soundless Wind Chimeis already a success; winning the Best Feature Film, Nuovi Sguardiaward and a special mention under the Special Jury award at the 24thTorino GLBT Film Festival last month as well as a Teddy Award (theofficial LGBT award) nomination at the 59th Berlin International FilmFestival. It is now distributed by Hong Kong’s Golden Scene and willhit Hong Kong screens in the summer, followed by cinemas in NorthAmerica, the United Kingdom and Europe. There’ll be a DVD, it seems, bythe end of the year. By then, Kit will be deep into his next project, amusical film, and is moving for the time being to Hong Kong to work onit. Here he’ll also carry on doing other things as well, includingteaching at the City and Polytech Universities. His next film, he says,will not, for once, be a film with a gay theme, but then Kit doesn’tbelieve his earlier films have just been ‘gay films’ either, ratherfilms about relationships in which the characters happen to be gay.“Gay films have been an opportunity for me,” Kit confesses. “They arenot a limitation. To make something close to you it’s easier to workwith the greater energy and passion that your feelings and experiencebring to the screen. My films have given me the chance to show what Ican do,” he adds. Paradoxically, he believes that the next few years,difficult though they may be economically, may give independent filmmakers opportunities as the big commercial projects find fewer backers.“There’ll be a lot of creative hunger that’ll need filling up.” He forone intends to rise to this challenge.