An imaginative Hong Kong filmmaker will visit UBC’s Point Grey campus for a free screening of her 2017 documentary, I’ve Got the Blues 水底行走的人. In 2019, Angie On-Kei Chen 陳安琪 received a Special Mention from the Hong Kong Directors’ Guild for this unusual film. It shows her provoking Hong Kong painter Wong Yankwai 黃仁逵 in extended conversations that elicit a range of emotions. At times, the director and subject even engage in heated on-screen arguments.
Their authentic interactions earned I’ve Got the Blues 水底行走的人 the Best Feature-length Documentary Award at Festival Film Dokumenter in Indonesia. The UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative has organized the screening and Q&A with Chen at 2 p.m. on Saturday (September 20) in Room 120 of the Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory (2202 Main Mall). The UBC Department of Asian Studies is a supporter.
Chen was born in Shanghai in 1949. Her family moved to Taiwan not long after as Communist forces were poised to win the Chinese Civil War. She attended the University of Iowa for her B.A. and M.A., and also received an MFA from UCLA.
In the 1980s, Chen made three daring films for the Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong. One was the Rear Window–inspired Maybe It’s Love. The second, My Name Ain’t Suzie, focused on bar girls in Hong Kong’s red-light district. She also directed a romance called Chaos By Design.
“I think what I wanted to do with my films was give a bigger voice to women,” Chen said in a Notebook interview on the Mubi.com website. “Because in those days there really weren’t a lot of women in power. In kung fu films, women were flower vases. So I decided to have really strong women characters.”
Watch the trailer for I’ve Got the Blues 水底行走.
Chen reinvents herself as documentary director
After directing Chaos By Design, Chen switched to making commercials and advertising films. However, 20 years later, Chen reinvented herself as a documentary feature filmmaker with the critically acclaimed This Daring Life. It explored 10 relationships between dog owners and their canine companions. And it earned Chen a Best Documentary nomination at the Golden Horse Film Festival.
In an interview with Forum Film Dokumenter, Chen revealed that she chose the documentary format because it was fastest way to make a film. Morever, she didn’t need a big crew or lots of money to do this. At the time, she had an old, dying dog.
“I felt quite painful, it was like person dying,” Chen told the publication.
Her next film in 2012, One Tree, Three Lives, was about novelist Hualing Nieh Engle. Born in wartime China, she moved to Taipei in 1949. In the 1960s, Engle found happiness after migrating to the United States and later marrying her poet-husband, Paul Engle. For this film, Chen received the Film Merit Award at the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards.
In 2017, the Vancouver International Film Festival premiered I’ve Got the Blues 水底行走的人 about the artist Wong, who led a low-key life and was only known within his own circle of acquaintances.
“After I finished my second feature I was looking around for something to do, and suddenly he’s there,” Chen told Forum Film Dokumenter. “He’s a musician, painter, writer, set designer, and a photographer. I mean, a lot of people will call this kind of person a Renaissance man.”
Event details
The UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative will present a free screening of premiered I’ve Got the Blues 水底行走的人 at 2 p.m. on Saturday (September 20) in Room 120 of the Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory (2202 Main Mall). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Angie On-Kei Chen 陳安琪. To register, visit the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative website. Follow Pancouver on X @PancouverMedia, on Bluesky @pancouver, and on Instagram @PancouverMedia.
