Blue Sun Palace: EAFFI Discoveries

Shot in beautiful 35mm film, Chinese American writer-director Constance Tsang’s luminous debut feature is a delicate, atmospheric melodrama set in Flushing, Queens, NYC. Amy (Ke-Xi Wu) and Didi (Haipeng Xu), two Chinese migrants work in a small parlour salon. Uprooted and far from their loved ones, their deep sisterhood helps them survive the temporal and emotional toll their work demands in a strange land. Didi has a secret lover, Cheung (Lee Kang-Sheng, actor of the great Tsai Ming-Liang), but when violence intrudes everything falls apart, and Amy finds herself alone, forced to consider her own destiny. Intimately filmed in her home neighbourhood, Constance Tsang brings poignancy to the state of contemporary exile, with airy, unobtrusive camera movement and long takes translating loneliness and grief. 

(Marie-Pierre Richard, EAFFI Discoveries) 

Festival selection/awards: Winner French Touch Prize of the Jury, Cannes Critics’ Week 2024 

“(A) resolutely humane but fiercely unsentimental film.” IndieWire