Musically rich and stylistically bold, We Don’t Dance for Nothing is a strikingly original debut feature from Chinese-Greek-American director Stefanos Tai. Drawing on the real testimonies of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, Tai constructs an artful blend of docu-drama fiction, photo-montage flashbacks and live-action dance numbers that feels experimental but never jarringly so. The film is being billed as Chris Marker’s La Jetee meets La La Land, which is a catchy pitch even if partly intended as a playful cinematic in-joke. In its darker chapters, it feels closer to an almost-real version of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Heading for its European premiere at Oldenburg film festival in Germany this week, We Don’t Dance for Nothing will probably be limited to art-house outlets by its unusual format, which mostly consists of still photos and voice-over narration. But this left-field approach should also be a selling point to the right target audience, with more festivals and specialist platforms likely to be drawn by Tai’s empathetic depiction of a marginalised global underclass and imaginative slant on timely political themes, from Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement to LGBT rights.
Tai conceived We Don’t Dance For Nothing during an extended stay in Hong Kong, embedding himself among Filipino exiles working in domestic service there, a vast subculture of around 200,000 economic migrants. Most are female, paid minimum wages for long hours of degrading work, with no chance of permanent residency and the constant threat of deportation hanging over them. More than half face abuse of some kind, and many have left family behind to help raise another mother’s children. It is a credit to Tai that he does not make these issue-heavy themes too dominant, blending them into a broader dramatic story about music and sunshine, love and sex, physical and emotional-emancipation.
The film’s heroine, simply called “H” (Miles Sible), is a 26-year-old Filipina working as cook, nanny, cleaner and general dogsbody for a Hong Kong family, whose cramped apartment she also shares. Her employers can be demanding and haughty, but they are not one-dimensional monsters, while their two pre-teen children clearly adore H. Even so, she struggles under the nagging conviction that she is “living someone else’s life by mistake”, and dreams of escape to other shores, even if it means breaking her work contract and possibly becoming an illegal “stowaway” in faraway Europe. “I always knew I would need to make a run for it,” she explains as the story opens.
During their brief breaks from domestic drudgery, H and her gang of fellow Filipina “helpers” gather to eat, drink, gossip and dance to joyous tropical pop, often breaking into synchronised routines in outdoor spaces. These “flash mob” sequences, some featuring real migrant workers, are a key motif and one of the film’s stylistic strengths, recalling the street-level musicals of Jacques Demy. One of Tai’s stylistic conceits involves framing scenes of stifling domestic duty in photo-montage format while these outbursts of all-singing, all-dancing liberation are shot in more fluid, colourful live action.
Woven into this main narrative are some resonant subplots, including real reportage footage of the pro-democracy protests that shook Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020, with H and her friends playing bemused spectators. “How many of them went home to dinner cooked by someone like me?” she ponders, adding an interesting intersectional twist to the riots. H’s budding lesbian affair with another Filipina exile, the glamorous and confident Sampa (Xyza Cada), is depicted with tasteful ambiguity but never quite feels convincing. Ultimately, Sampa proves less of a free spirit than she appears, and does not provide the rebellious rocket boost that H requires to achieve escape velocity from her stifling life.
We Don’t Dance for Nothing is not a flawless experiment. Tai’s stylised photo-montage approach leaves little room for subtle character shading, while some of the voice-over dialogue veers a little too much into tear-jerking melodrama. But there is self-awareness and nuance at work here. During one reconstructed memory of a spat with her employee, H admits to being an unreliable narrator: “I’m not sure if she was really that cruel or if I just needed her to be”, she concedes, a nicely meta critique of cinematic subjectivity. The film’s emotionally charged finale, a desperate dash through an eerily empty airport, is also rich in visual poetry and deftly deployed sound design.
Director, screenwriter: Stefanos Tai
Cast: Miles Sible, Xyza Cada, Juliana Wong, Ana Agawa, Gratiano Wong
Producer: Paloma Choque
Cinematography: Ran Zhang
Editing: Makamoto
Choreographers: Jennifer Chiang, Lauren Beare
Sound design: Jack Tse
Music: Bill Liang
Prodution company: Kipos (US)
Venue: Oldenburg International Film Festival
In English, Tagalog, Chinese, Spanish
86 minutes
