The Way We Talk

The Way We Talk (2025)

看我今天怎麼說

Let your heart lead the way.

Wolf, born into a deaf family, embraces sign language with confidence despite obstacles in life; Sophie, having received a cochlear implant at a young age, continuously strives to be seen as "normal" despite having a "deaf accent." Alan, with a cochlear implant like Sophie, is capable of both spoken language and sign language; he advocates for diverse modes of communication within the deaf community. Bound by love and friendship, the three embark on a self-discovering journey that is not without its moments of pain.

Date of release
2025-01-18
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (6)
Runtime
2h 12m
Genres
Drama, Comedy
Director
Adam Wong

Casting

Interesting facts

The Way We Talk is a 2024 Hong Kong drama film directed and co-written by Adam Wong. Produced by One Cool Film Production, it stars Neo Yau, Chung Suet Ying, and Marco Ng. The film explores the identity conflicts of a cochlear implant user (Chung) as she navigates whether to integrate with hearing people or embrace the deaf community after befriending a sign language enthusiast (Yau).

Production

In early 2020, director and screenwriter Adam Wong conceived the film during a meal with screenwriter SeeKing, where they discussed a short film series created by producer Ho Hong about deaf people signing underwater, sparking Wong's interest in producing a film about them. Wong began field research, referencing the memoir My Deaf Friends and the American documentary Sound and Fury (2000).

After a year of pre-production, a deaf friend of Wong suggested that he'd include real deaf people in the project. Wong agreed and decided to cast one of the three protagonists with a deaf actor. Marco Ng, who had been deaf since the age of two due to a genetic mutation, was recommended for the role by his secondary school teacher after he won Mister Deaf World in 2023.

In May 2022, Wong approached Neo Yau for the final protagonist role, and Yau received the screenplay in August 2022 while pre-producing the action film Little Fighters (2025) with his production company Trial & Error. He put aside his producer work to take on the role, citing reasons related to his passion in acting.

Principal photography took place in 2023, with Leung Ming Kai acting as the cinematographer. Adam Wong noted that he took a more casual approach to location scouting compared to his previous feature The Way We Keep Dancing, which focuses on the themes of real estate hegemony and requires specific filming locations to present the phenomenon, while The Way We Talk addresses a more universal theme and he did not want it to be overshadowed by promine…

Wong also selected a beach as another main setting for the film, finding it relatively quiet and suitable as a private space for the protagonists. He initially considered filming in Changsha, Hunan, but deemed it unrealistic for the Hongkonger protagonists to suddenly go there within the screenplay's context, and he ultimately decided to shoot the scene in Hong Kong, despite the nearby mansions appearing in the frame.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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