Sisterhood
Directed by: Tracy Choi
We Are One Global Film Festival
Curated by: Macau International Film Festival
A coming of age, beautiful, heart-breaking love story.
It is a film set in two timelines, 15 years apart. It starts off with a young girl who starts looking for jobs in a massage parlour in Macau. She makes friends there, they have petty fights and help each other. Slowly, it turns into a poignant tale of heartbreak, when we know that one of their friend is dead now after 15 years. As we go deeper into the story, the heartbreak keeps on increasing as we get to know that they were close friends, they fell in love with each other but couldn't express it to each other. They together raise a child. It's such a beautiful film. We see the character grow and come of age, in the older timeline and now we see how things have changed. It evokes a sense of nostalgia in us, making us feel how different life used to be back then. This contrast is brought visually, they use bokeh effects and they use vibrant and shiny colors and lighting in the older track, in the current track we see dull, blue colors depicting melancholy. The present track reminded me of Kieslowski's Blue of the Three Color Trilogy. It also reminded me of Jersey, in a way how brilliantly information is withheld and revealed when it can give the maximum amount of emotional impact.
This film making style looks a bit like Hirokazu Kore-eda in a way how he portrays emotions sensitively. The lighting also looked that way, it is just less than being overexposed a lot of times. This was especially there in Kore-eda's Our Little Sister. The milieu of the massage parlours in Macau is beautifully explored, their teacher, the person who gives them jobs at his new parlour, the pastry shop owner and it is dealt in an empathetic and a sensitive way. I'm eager to check out other films by Tracy Choi.
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