It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in her thirties, must be in want of a husband – that, at least, is what the more conservative members of a Chinese society like Hong Kong’s would have you believe. But don’t tell that to filmmaker Norris Wong Yee-lam, 33, and actress Stephy Tang Lai-yan, 36, neither of whom are married. Both seem to be having the time of their lives.
The pair’s new film, My Prince Edward, has become one of the most celebrated Hong Kong productions of the past year. Set around Golden Plaza, a shopping centre for affordable wedding supplies in Prince Edward, a working-class Hong Kong neighbourhood, it addresses marriage and personal freedom through the story of Fong, played by Tang, and her long-term boyfriend Edward (Chu Pak-hong).
Before this film, Wong was known for her screenwriting work on Margaret & David: Green Bean, a series that aired on ViuTV – a free-to-air TV station based in Hong Kong.
My Prince Edward, her first full-length feature, received three nominations in Taipei’s Golden Horse Film Awards (known as the Oscars of Chinese-language film), and eight nominations in the Hong Kong Film Awards; the film picked up two prizes – for best new director and original film score – in the latter.
“I’m very happy with the results, especially because this is just my first film,” Wong says. “But perhaps this is down to there having been fewer films released on the market each year. It has become easier for one film to receive eight nominations.”
“I realise that people have helped me a lot,” she adds. “I’m a new director and we didn’t have a sizeable budget. I think they gave me the best new director honour as encouragement. Perhaps they thought the other candidates are well-established enough that they didn’t need this award [as much as me].”
The filmmaker has grown in confidence since making My Prince Edward. The film established her as one of the more promising among a new generation of directors.
Tang told the Post: “The Norris we see today is very different from the one I first met. She’s still the same person in the way she’s always very shy, and awkward with her posture in front of the camera. But the way Wong speaks and the aura she projects are very different from the way she used to be.”
With a laugh, she adds: “When I first met her, I was a little worried, thinking: ‘This director is so shy – would it be quite hard to communicate with her?’ I mean, I had never met a film director who needed me to take the initiative to strike up a conversation with her.”
The decisive moment for Wong came on May 4, 2017 – her 30th birthday. It was the day she started writing My Prince Edward. She finished the first draft and, in August of that year – with the encouragement of Oliver Chan Siu-kuen ( ), a fellow alumnus of Hong Kong Baptist University’s film academy – she submitted it to the Hong Kong government’s First Feature Film Initiative, set up to nurture new talent in the film industry.
She was granted HK$3.25 million (US$419,000) to make the film under the initiative, and began shooting it in 2018. The size of the cast and the film’s main location, Golden Plaza, were chosen with that budget in mind. The production was at times so threadbare that what Wong remembers most from filming was her crew pulling off difficult shots with minimal resources.
“I remember we shot a scene around a Chinese wedding gown shop with [Nina Paw Hee-ching],” she recalls. “It was done in one shot with a handheld camera. After we finished, Paw asked if we’d watched [the no-budget Japanese zombie comedy] – she said we were filming just like [the characters in] that film. It was quite fun.”
My Prince Edward eschews the fairy-tale view of relationships typical of Hong Kong films in favour of a warts-and-all look at one. Wong cites American film and Iranian film , both about the disintegration of long-term relationships, as her references. “I was hoping to make a film that feels similar to those two,” she says.
Asked to pinpoint the source of her protagonists’ problem, Wong says she thought at first it was Fong’s compromising and Edward’s possessiveness. “Once I made the film, I realised it is communication,” says Wong. “Between them, there’s no effective way to talk to each other. They don’t communicate even though they are living together.”
For Tang, a former pop idol and a two-time Hong Kong Film Awards best actress nominee, the uniqueness of Wong’s film resides in its authentic reconstruction of the everyday experience. “The film depicts very trivial matters that happen every day in real life – but why did we turn them into a movie?” she says.
“When these concerns are shown in movies, they help you realise there are issues in your life that are worth observing and thinking over. This is what’s most interesting about movies: there are a lot of things we neglect and take for granted in relationships, but you see new things when you consider it from a third person’s perspective.”
In My Prince Edward, Fong prioritises her own freedom and doesn’t bow to the pressure on women to get married and start a family. Asked if she would also confound the societal expectation of Hong Kong actresses that they marry and withdraw from the spotlight in their thirties, Tang (who is in a relationship with her own prince, Taiwanese singer-actor Prince Chiu) is unconcerned.
“At the moment, I’m very happy with the way things are,” she says. “I’m satisfied with what I have now. It’s a choice. Many actresses overseas have also returned to work after giving birth – that’s doable too. In Hong Kong, there’s a shortage of opportunities for actresses. If they have children or leave for the Chinese market, our talent pool becomes smaller and smaller.”
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