Talking about love and Mom’s influence… with Derek Tsang, Director of Lover’s Discourse (Toronto International Reel Asian Film Festival Opening Gala)

Lover’s Discourse is a four-part film about a group of seemingly unconnected characters in Hong Kong who are fixated on love. The film premiered to a very receptive audience at the recent Toronto International Reel Asian Film Festival as the Opening Gala presentation.   I had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about love, life and how his parents influenced him…

CULTURED PEARL: This movie doesn’t show any couples quite connecting in their story lines in the typical “happy in love ever after” formulas of Hollywood (hence, the film’s title), so does this mean you don’t really believe in love? Is it all just in our minds?

TSANG: The idea of any couple living “happily in love ever after” is absurd to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in love. Love is not just happiness; it is many different things, suffering tolerance, forgiveness, and compassion can all fall under what we feel or term as love.

CULTURED PEARL: I love the way you use different scenarios from “what could have been” with the first couple, “fantasy” with the second, “forbidding and not accepting of love” for the third, and then “betrayal”. Then inter-twining some of the characters at the end The most humours being the laundry shop. If you could continue the stories, how would they end?

TSANG: The idea for the film as a whole and each of the particular stories came from the Chinese characters used to categorize different types of amorous relationships. For example, the second story..makes up of Chinese characters of dim or dark and love, is a term that we describe when one is secretly in love with someone. We thought it would be an interesting project to encompass a story for every different types of love the Chinese language has a term form. Not surprisingly, we had a lot more than four at the beginning of the scriptwriting process.

I don’t like endings to my stories, I prefer to believe that they will continue on its own path. The only real ending is death; other than that, the show must go on…

CULTURED PEARL: You come from a family in show business, for my readers who are not familiar, what were some moments in life that made you realize that this is the business for you?

TSANG: I always tell people that my dad has nothing to do with me deciding to be in this business. Yet lately, I’ve come to think that I’ve been telling that tale to really convince myself. There isn’t really any particular moments in life that made me decide to become a filmmaker, I just fell in love with the art of cinema when I was in high school and decided rather naively that I want to become a director. This is what I told others and myself many times, subconsciously downplaying my father’s role in shaping my career. I guess it is just me trying to avoid giving others the impression that I’m riding on my dad’s success.

CULTURED PEARL: Because our readership is mostly mothers, did your mother/parents encourage you in this direction of entertainment when growing up?

TSANG: My mother is one of the coolest moms I’ve ever come across. She has never stopped being the most supportive person in my world. Ever since I can remember, she has always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do, even to the extend of buying alcohol for me and my friends before we were of legal drinking age, that’s how fucking cools she is!! Hahahahaha…when it came to my career, we never really talked about it much, she just knew that it was what I wanted to do and she was fully supportive of it. The only thing she wanted was for me to complete my higher education, in what she called my backup plan in case my entertainment career failed I would still have a diploma. And I did my four years just for her.

CULTURED PEARL: To the non-Asian market, anything you want them to know about your film on an international scope? Hong Kong is on the other side of the world but cosmopolitan. Love happens the same way there, right?

TSANG: Except for the language and locales in the film, LOVER’S DISCOURSE, is a combination of stories that can happen in any cities. I have traveled with the film to many different countries for the past year or so, and it always thrills me to find that people from different cultures all see able to understand and enjoy the film as the audiences in any Chinese-speaking cities. I just hope the film can reach as many audiences as possible.

The Toronto International Reel Asian Film Festival celebrates it’s 15th Anniversary from November 8-13 (and extends to Richmond Hill Nov.18/19). The festival features more than 55 films and videos from over 12 countries. Award-winning international films are from Taiwan, Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vietnam, United States and Canada. For more information and to catch some films in Richmond Hill this weekend visit Reel Asian Film Festival for more details.