Cultural background of “The Way We Are” and Tin Shui Wai
Izzy: “The Way We Are” is a movie directed by Ann Hui that explores the lives of a single mother and her son living in Tin Shui Wai, a public housing estate in Hong Kong. The film portrays the struggles and challenges faced by the working-class residents of the estate, highlighting issues such as poverty, isolation, and the lack of social support. The movie’s setting in Tin Shui Wai is significant, as it is an area known for its high poverty rate and social problems. Through its portrayal of the characters’ experiences, “The Way We Are” sheds light on the harsh realities of life in Tin Shui Wai and underscores the need for greater support and resources for the community.
Tin Shui Wai is a relatively new development situated in the northwest part of Hong Kong’s New Territories, bordering Tuen Mun and Yuen Long. Originally built to house Hong Kong’s growing population, it has a rich history as a formerly rural area consisting of villages and farmland. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong’s population began to rapidly grow, prompting the government to build new public housing estates, including Tin Shui Wai. This low-income neighborhood has a diverse population of immigrants, particularly from Mainland China, resulting in a unique cultural context and rich traditions that are celebrated through many festivals and events.
Scene analysis
Izzy: The scenes portrayed in “The Way We Are” are not far from the truth. Ann Hui’s choice to use a realistic filming technique helps to bridge the gap between reality and fiction, making the film feel like a true representation of the Tin Shui Wai community. The film’s focus on the everyday struggles of the characters also serves to humanize them, making their experiences relatable to audiences around the world.
Residential Estate
Della: Residential buildings in this film are old and desolate, mainly characterized by brick and cement in the exterior, tatty corridor and minimalist furniture in the interior. The conspicuous comparison between desolate physicality of dwellings and emotional bond of characters enhances humanistic affection and life flavor.
WELLCOME Supermarket
Della: WELLCOME Supermarket, a site chosen by Ann Hui, is symbolic with multi-faceted properties. It serves as a vital plot device to propel narration, avoiding the boredom of a blander storyline.
To begin with, WELLCOME Supermarket is a workplace for the two female protagonists Gwai Ze (贵姐) and Granny Leung (梁婆婆). Gwai Ze is a supermarket worker, one of whose jobs is to sort, cut and package durian. Granny Leung, on the other hand, packs and weighs vegetables. It can be evidently seen that the first function of WELLCOME Supermarket is to depict hardships of ordinary people in making a living.
Secondly, WELLCOME Supermarket is the embodiment of subsistence and livelihood. Several scenes related to money-saving on food take place here: Gwai Ze buys a bundle of discounted cooking oil to help Granny Leung save money; Granny Leung purchases eggs with Gwai Ze…The predicament conveys the survival hardships faced by the two poverty-stricken female characters.
Thirdly, WELLCOME supermarket is also the site of interpersonal connection and emotional empathy. The specialness of being together in the supermarket, is the subtle familiarity and intimacy of knowing each other’s food preference and purchasing habits. Therefore, it is reasonable to relate to three important scenes. The first scene is Granny Leung and Gwai Ze’s first encounter. This is the prologue of Gwai Ze and Granny Leung’s family-like bond connection, featured by medium shots, where the camera movement is prudent in order to show Granny Leung’s initial arrival to an unacquainted place. The second scene in the supermarket is the conversation between Granny Leung and Gwai Ze on examination scores of their grandson and son respectively. While talking, both characters are simultaneously dragging trunks of vegetables and fish. Therefore, the corresponding style of camera movement is considerably bold and dynamic, which is very rare in this film. This scene lays the foundation for the next plot: Gwai Ze’s accompany with Granny Leung to Sha Tin to visit her son-in-law, which marks the authentic emotional connection between the two characters. The last scene illustrating interpersonal connection is the conversation scene between Zoeng Gaa On (张家安) and Ms.Tsui. The student and the teacher’s mutual comprehension marks the perfect ending of humanistic feelings in this film.
In addition to its triple nature, WELLCOME Supermarket is also the most colorful place amongst the general low-saturation color palette in the film. Bright red, yellow and green together constitute the hallmark of interpersonal connection, highlighting the thematic connotation.
Public streets
Izzy: “The Way We Are” primarily features public parks and sidewalks in its depiction of the community streets. Following the daily life of Gwai Ze, the streets of the Tin Shui Wai area are showcased. The roadside streets are composed of both sidewalks and lanes, while the streets within the residential areas only have sidewalks, suggesting that in 2008, walking and public transportation were the main modes of transportation in Tin Shui Wai.
In the film, the camera angles of these streets are at a height similar to that of an average person, giving the audience a perspective that is close to the observations of everyday life. The use of realistic colors is particularly evident in the portrayal of public areas, from the grey-white sky, low-saturation brick floors and walls, to the natural shadows of trees, all of which depict the ordinary life of the Tin Shui Wai community. Although the public streets are always used as transitional scenes in the plot, Ann Hui’s selection of typical street scenes effortlessly captured the actual conditions of the streets in Tin Shui Wai during filming. Even though many lanes have been renovated fifteen years later, the sidewalks still feature the same tiles and white walls, reflecting the scenes depicted in the movie.
Schools
Izzy: The school attended by the male protagonist Zoeng Gaa On in the movie is ELCHK Yuen Long Lutheran Secondary School (基督教香港信義會元朗信義中學), a subsidized co-educational English secondary school located in Tin Shui Wai. It was founded by the Hong Kong Lutheran Church in 1959 and relocated from On Shing Street in Yuen Long to its current location in Tin Yiu Estate in Tin Shui Wai in 1993. In 2005, a new wing was built. After fifteen years, the teaching buildings in the school have been painted blue-green, but the fences and the exterior of the buildings still retain their appearance from the movie. Its building size is average among secondary schools in Hong Kong, and the exterior walls feature single-colored large stone slabs, giving it a modern minimalist feel.
In the movie, this scene appears as a background, with warm and bright tones that highlight Zoeng Gaa On’s leisurely life after exams and spending time with friends. Despite using strong exposure in this shot, Ann Hui still tried to restore the street’s true colors as much as possible. Some scenes of church teaching also appear in the movie, which realistically portray Zoeng Gaa On’s learning environment.
These Christian schools in Hong Kong are educational institutions that are established and operated by Christian organizations. They integrate Christian beliefs and values into their curriculum and school activities, providing a well-rounded education that emphasizes moral and spiritual development in addition to academic excellence.
Relationship between architecture and film
Della: Tin Shui Wai, first and foremost, is an enormous cluster of residential estates. As a suburban area located in New Territories, it is long positioned at the margin of Hong Kong’s development. Due to several ethically shocking homicide cases and its high suicide rate, the public tends to view it stereotypically as the ‘town of sadness’. However, Ann Hui’s film The Way We Are indirectly subverts this viewpoint, after the director’s research in the neighborhood.
The selection of architecture is closely related to thematic expression and emotional transmission. Instead of narrating the gloom or squalor of lower-class people surviving within cracks, cants and ‘dark corners’, Ann Hui rather portrays a truth-oriented biography of mediocre people’s daily life. In the beginning establishing shots, life-form of trees and light rail in motion jointly soothe the tone of coldness and desertion brought by building sites in erection process. At the ending shots, the evening glow outside the windowpane and twinkling lights of residential buildings construct a sense of warmth and tranquility brought by family reunion in Mid-Autumn Festival. Therefore, Tin Shui Wai’s unique spatial combination of dispersion on natural landscape and density in residential complexes is compatible with the filmic theme.
Overall, architecture chosen is the epitome of compassion, love and hope in the film The Way We Are.
By Zhao Lanyan (UID 3035977202) and Liu Xinyun (UID 30359833665)
There is some good analysis on the film and analysis on the ideas of social class. I appreciated your observations from conducting the fieldtrip around Tin Shui Wai area. Instead of using the narrative from the film to drive your analysis, it would be better if you focus on the different spaces in the film and how the camera moves around those spaces to depict different states of the character: Why are there more close-up shots in the residential spaces? What effects do the still shots and tracking shots have in showing the district? The tone and pace of the podcast is good, but a more conversational writing to the script would make it more engaging for viewers.