Hong Kong Palace Museum | HKPM Movies: Golden Gate Girls and Post-screening Conversation

Yau Sum Yin

Assistant Curator of Hong Kong Palace Museum

Sum Yin Yau received her MA degrees in Cultural Management and History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and SOAS, University of London, respectively, and holds a BA degree in Museology from Fudan University, Shanghai. She joins from the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, where she was in the curatorial teams of exhibitions including “Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture” and “Fashion Revolution: Chinese dress from late Qing to 1976”. She has made curatorial contribution to a number of opening exhibitions at the Hong Kong Palace Museum, including “The Quest for Originality: Contemporary Design and Traditional Craft in Dialogue”, “Entering the Forbidden City: Architecture, Collection, and Heritage”, “Clay to Treasure: Ceramics from the Palace Museum Collection”, “No Boundaries: Reinterpreting Palace Museum Culture”, and “The Making of Masterpieces: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from the Palace Museum”. She has most recently led the curation of the Museum’s special exhibition “Cartier and Women”.

S. Louisa Wei

Film Director

S. Louisa Wei was born and raised in China. She left China in 1992 to study literature and film in Canada. In 2001, she moved to Hong Kong. Over the past 13 years, she has been teaching film production, story writing, and media culture courses at the City University of Hong Kong while making films.

As a documentarian, Wei’s first released work was the short musical Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006), broadcasted on Channel 13 of Cable TV Hong Kong. Her feature-length Storm under the Sun (2009) premiered at IDFA in 2007, a vastly revised version was then on view at the HKIFF in 2009. Storm under the Sun has not only received warm feedback from audience members and film critics but has also been viewed by historians and sinologists as a rare effort and great contribution to documentary development. Her feature documentary, Golden Gate Girls (also known as Golden Gate Silver Light), sponsored by the Hong Kong Art Development Council, received positive reviews and attention from The Hollywood Reporter, Voice of America, South China Morning Post, Film Business Asian after its premier at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2013. Later it closed the Women Make Waves Taiwan Film Festival and showed in England and America.

Wei began writing creatively as a teenager and won many awards in various writing competitions. In 2005, she co-wrote the script for the feature film Show You Color with Cui Jian, pioneer rocker of China. This script won an award at the Busan International Film Festival in 2006. In 2012, Cui Jian directed a feature film entitled Blue Bone that was based in part on this script. In 2007, Wei assisted Hong Kong director Susie Au in the production of Ming Ming, co-writing the script and helping the director obtain funds for the project. In the same year, she wrote the script for Gun of Mercy and was credited as the primary scriptwriter in the film’s release. The film was a positive portrayal of a Chinese policeman, with Wei’s writing lending the story a complex narrative structure and a series of unexpected twists. In 2009, she wrote the script of Storm under the Sun. She wrote another script for Broken Wings: An Incomplete Genius in the next year. In 2012, she completed the script for Golden Gate Girls in both English and Chinese. She also worked on the scripts for two documentaries: Flower Girl from Havana, about a Cuban lady who performed Cantonese opera in Cuba for ten years, and Dream under the Sun, a film about Cui Jian and his fans.