엘레지 (2023)

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Elegies is a 2023 Hong Kong documentary film directed by Ann Hui. Produced by PicaPica Media and distributed by Golden Scene, the film features interviews with various Hong Kong poets, most notably Huang Canran and Liu Wai-tong, along with footage of the late Xi Xi and Leung Ping-kwan. The film dissects the daily lives of Hong Kong poets and examines their views on poetry, exploring the decline of Hong Kong's poetry culture.

Production

Filmmaker Ann Hui was introduced to poetry as a child, where her grandfather taught her the works of Li Bai. She continued to enjoy reading and developed a fondness for poetry during her secondary school years, particularly the 18th and 19th centuries poets like John Keats, and members of the Crescent Moon Society like Xu Zhimo and Bing Xin. She described poetry as "her protective talisman" that accompanied her through her youth.

Around 1976, after completing the anthology series Below the Lion Rock, Hui intended to pursue two passion projects: one was an adaptation of Eileen Chang's novella Love in a Fallen City (1943), and the other a documentary about classical Chinese poetry. She decided to prioritise the novel adaptation and completed the film Love in a Fallen City (1984).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous filming projects were postponed or scrapped, prompting Ann Hui to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking, which she found to be more flexible in the realm of documentary. She came across the poem "Woman in Love" by Huang Canran, which she found rich in imagery and dramatic quality, and inspired her to revisit her previous poetry project idea.

In mid-2020, Hui wrote an outline to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to apply for funding but was unsuccessful. She then sought funding from various art foundations and ultimately approached Ken Hui, the owner of PicaPica Media, to co-create the project.

Hui began advancing the project in late 2020, starting her research and reading works by different poets. She also required the entire crew to familiarise themselves with the poems of Huang and Liu. For each interviewee, she would select 20 of their poems, choose 10 to feature, and then narrow it down to six or eight for the final cut, discussing which ones to cut with the poets during the interviews.

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