Beautiful 2012

Mei Hao 2012

A superb package of shorts by four leading East Asian directors: Ann Hui on a male-to-female sex change, Kim Tae-yong on an emotional imposture, Gu Changwei on pregnancy in China and Tsai Ming-Liang on time and the city of Hong Kong.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director Kim Tae-yong, Tsai Ming-liang, Ann Hui, Gu Changwei
  • Screenwriter Kim Tae-yong, Kim Young-hyun, Tsai Ming-liang, Yang Weiwei, Lou Shiu-wa
  • With Gong Hyo-jin, Lee Kang-Sheng, Yan Lianke
  • Hong Kong 2012
  • 90 mins
  • Production company Youku.com, Hong Kong International Film Festival

This superb package of shorts by leading East Asian directors (commissioned by the Hong Kong Film Festival) offers four kinds of pleasure. There’s a sophisticated sketch of the space between emotional imposture and sincerity in Kim Tae-yong’s episode, about a closeted young man who hires a girl to play his fiancée for the benefit of his dying father. Tsai Ming-liang’s masterly episode has no words except the lyrics to one of Sam Hui’s loveliest songs; a mysterious barefoot man (a monk?) moves through the day and night of Hong Kong at a haunted pace of his own. Gu Changwei’s calculatedly offhand episode centres on a candid family conversation about pregnancies, wanted and unwanted. And Ann Hui zeroes in with empathy on a middle-aged office worker who has finally decided to act on his conviction that he’s actually a woman – to the dismay of his wife.

Tony Rayns