The Way We Are

Watch for

• How little conventional plot the film requires: shopping, cooking, work shifts, exam results and a gifted durian accumulate into a portrait of community through repetition rather than crisis.
• Paw Hee-ching’s performance as Kwai, whose generosity is matter-of-fact and unsentimental; the film repeatedly lets kindness happen without turning it into a heroic gesture.
• The apartment blocks, supermarket aisles, markets and transit spaces of Tin Shui Wai, photographed as lived environments instead of shorthand for social despair.
• The documentary-like material about women who sacrificed education and opportunity for their families, which widens one household’s story into a generational history of working women in Hong Kong.

Production notes

Made for roughly HK$1 million, The Way We Are was deliberately small even by Hong Kong standards. Ann Hui worked from Lou Shiu-wa’s screenplay and with a cast led by Paw Hee-ching and Chan Lai-wan, using Tin Shui Wai itself as the film’s social landscape. At a time when the district was routinely labeled a “City of Sadness,” Hui chose the opposite register: patient observation of ordinary life. The modest production went on to win four Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. What Ann Hui and the production team built is inseparable from the way the story reaches the viewer. A third craft element to notice: The apartment blocks, supermarket aisles, markets and transit spaces of Tin Shui Wai, photographed as lived environments instead of shorthand for social despair. A fourth: The documentary-like material about women who sacrificed education and opportunity for their families, which widens one household’s story into a generational history of working women in Hong Kong. The 91-minute finished film continually converts those decisions into tone and meaning. That is the useful production story here: not a detached list of facts, but an account of why the movie looks, moves and feels the way it does. In other words, the making of the film is visible in the finished film rather than hidden behind it.

Trivia

• Paw Hee-ching recalled the production as having little money and little commercial apparatus—its strongest resource was the commitment of the people making it.
• Hui followed this warm, restrained Tin Shui Wai portrait with Night and Fog, a much darker film set in the same district, making the two works revealing companion pieces.
• Made for roughly HK$1 million, The Way We Are was deliberately small even by Hong Kong standards.
• Ann Hui worked from Lou Shiu-wa’s screenplay and with a cast led by Paw Hee-ching and Chan Lai-wan, using Tin Shui Wai itself as the film’s social landscape.
• At a time when the district was routinely labeled a “City of Sadness,” Hui chose the opposite register: patient observation of ordinary life.

Legacy

The Way We Are is one of Ann Hui’s purest demonstrations that social cinema does not require sensationalism. By treating a much-maligned district as a place of routines, mutual dependence and historical memory, it challenged both media stereotypes and the expectation that poverty must be dramatized through catastrophe. Its four Hong Kong Film Awards and enduring critical standing have made it a touchstone for low-key, location-specific Hong Kong realism. Its place in this Top 100 matters partly because a convincing Hong Kong canon has to make room for drama as well as the films that became international shorthand for the industry. What still feels especially alive: How little conventional plot the film requires: shopping, cooking, work shifts, exam results and a gifted durian accumulate into a portrait of community through repetition rather than crisis. Just as important: The documentary-like material about women who sacrificed education and opportunity for their families, which widens one household’s story into a generational history of working women in Hong Kong. A canon is most useful when it sends viewers back to the movies themselves. Here, the history explains why the film mattered, while the surviving craft explains why it is still worth watching now. That continuing readability is the strongest argument for keeping the film active in the canon.