ABSTRACT
The Macau-born, Hong Kong-Australian director Clara Law, who moved from Hong Kong to Melbourne in 1995, has made three films in Australia, Floating Life (1996), The Goddess of 1967 (2000) and Letters to Ali (2004), all co-written with her partner Eddie Fong and set in Australia. Like most of the previous films they made in Hong Kong, such as Farewell China (1991) and Autumn Moon (1992), their Australian films explore themes of migration and displacement, notions of home and intercultural interpersonal relations. Floating Life takes the form of a quasi-ritualised encounter between a Hong Kong family who migrate to Australia and their new homeland, The Goddess of 1967 dramatises an encounter between a Japanese vintage car fanatic, a blind Irish-Australian girl, their inner demons and the Australian Outback, and Letters to Ali is a personalised film-essay about a Melbourne family’s attempt to adopt an Afghan asylum-seeker which also deals autobiographically with Law’s own feelings about being a Chinese migrant in Australia. All three are ‘arthouse’ films which engage both thematically and stylistically with exile, displacement and the search for home in Australia, and have marked Law as an important ‘diasporic multicultural’ Australian film maker,1 a Hong Kong artist in exile and a transnational, cosmopolitan director who continues to exhibit her films at international festivals. Influenced by Ozu and Tarkowsky, whose film Mirror she introduced on Australia multicultural television channel SBS in 1999, Law and Fong reacted strongly against the commercial pressures of the Hong Kong film industry, which had a conditioning impact on the production of Law’s first film, the romantic comedy The Other Half and the Other Half (1988) and her Leon Lai vehicle about an abortive business venture Fruit Punch (1991). Nonetheless in both these films she still attempted to explore themes of migration and exile, such as the ‘astronaut syndrome’ in the former and migration to Australia in the latter, albeit in a decidedly lighthearted vein. This essay examines her journey into new thematic and stylistic directions since moving to Australia, as well as critical reception of the three films she has made there, and her emergence as a transnational film maker.
