This screening will be preceded by an introduction and post-screening discussion with author Amanda Lee Koe

4K RESTORATION
Original Title: 青蛇
Year: 1993
Director: Tsui Hark
Runtime: 99 min
Country: Hong Kong
Language: Cantonese with English subtitles
Rating: NC16

Synopsis

Adapted from the classic Chinese folktale, The Legend of the White Snake (白蛇传), Tsui Hark’s masterful retelling focuses on the mischievous ancient creatures, Green Snake aka Xiao Qing (Maggie Cheung) and White Snake aka Bai Sou-Ching (Joey Wong), who transform themselves into two charming young women. Persecuted by Taoist monks who zealously hunt down what they believe to be evil forces, the two snake spirits discover the complexity of humanity, desire and anger, laughter and tears when they become romantically entangled with mortal men.

Made at the height of the Hong Kong New Wave by one of its key proponents, the idiosyncratically psychedelic and lushly sensual film speaks to a fluidity of identity and desires of a half-woman half-serpent, played by Maggie Cheung. A celebration of performance and illusion, this romantic fantasy-allegory ruminates on post-1997 Hong Kong,  pushing the themes running through Tsui Hark’s filmography to their limits: the eternal and inextricable links between history, the archaic and modern, religion and politics.

About the Speaker

​​Amanda Lee Koe is a novelist. She was editor of the National Museum of Singapore’s Cinémathequè Quarterly, and the fiction editor of Esquire Singapore. She was the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for the short story collection Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram, 2014), shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LiBeraturpreis and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s International Literature Prize.

Her debut novel, Delayed Rays of A Star (Doubleday, 2019), won the Henfield Prize, awarded to the best work of fiction by an MFA candidate at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. It was a Straits Times #1 Bestseller, and an NPR Best Books of the Year.

Her second novel, Sister Snake, will be published in Winter 2024 by Ecco Books.

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