VERDICT: Mass wig exportation becomes the lens through which this fascinating, spectral doc explores Hong Kong's late 20th-century modernisation and position between East and West.
Various forms of liminality are central to Bo Wang’s odd and utterly compelling short, An Asian Ghost Story.
It inhabits a space intersecting documentary and fiction, combining playful silliness and thoughtful investigation. It is about a late 20th-century Asia in the midst of modernisation, about Hong Kong’s somewhat unique position between East and West, and about a realm that straddles the worlds of the living and the dead. Using a blend of techniques, from observational documentary to acted fictional sequences and archival newsreel footage – all unified by a lo-fi VHS aesthetic – Wang creates a haunting essay film that constantly subverts its own non-fiction credentials.
The film opens with city scenes from contemporary Hong Kong while a female narrator, speaking in English, sets the scene for our story as beginning in the 1960s. A woman working in a wig factory encounters an otherworldly presence – a wig possessed by the spirit of the Japanese woman whose hair went into making it. From here, Wang’s film takes in the history of wig exports in the post-war period, as an example of trade restrictions imposed on Communist China during the Cold War years. In this case, Hong Kong becomes the new hotbed for this industry resulting – according to the film’s supernatural narrative – in an increase in ghosts with long hair wandering the city streets.
Wang expertly weaves together the genuine socio-political elements of Hong Kong’s emergence as a wig production powerhouse with ridiculous pseudo-documentary sequences like a scientist explaining a new EVP device that can listen to severed hair and identify the language and homeland of the spirit voices bound to it. It makes for a film that is interesting in that it often makes even its more factual observations harder to take a face value, but it also creates an element to this story that gives a surreal spiritual aspect to the march of globalisation. It is redolent with the uncanny quality of a truly unnerving ghost story while engaging with a fascinating slice of Hong Kong’s recent history.
Director, screenplay, editing: Bo Wang
Cast: Zoenie Liwen Deng, Ruoyao Jane Yao, Zoe Tang, Michael de Ross, Sidney Vereycken
Producers: Ruoyao Jane Yao, Jia Zhao
Cinematography: Yavuz Selim Isler, Fai Wan
Sound: Jeroen Goeijers, Franco van Der Linde
Production: Vine Films
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Documentary Film)
In English, Cantonese
37 minutes
