“I’ve always played characters who are gentle, professional and independent women, so instead of just taking up another similar role as an architect’s daughter who doesn’t cry at her father’s funeral, I wanted to challenge myself to be different,” she says. “While on the surface they all appear to be tough, the trick is to dive deep into the different reasons or traumas that have shaped them this way—the fragility beneath.”

Choi’s attraction to films about social issues and sentimental subjects comes from her admiration for Korean director Lee Chang-dong, a three-time winner of the Asian Film Award best director prize, whose works, focusing mainly on society, particularly elderly people, in South Korea, Choi describes as poetic and powerful.

Compared to when she started out aged 22, Choi believes her work has meaning; in A Light, she is proud to have contributed to a movie that explores and, in a way, preserves the city’s sunset industry of neon signs. She hopes the success of the film will continue to move the local industry away from the predominance of gritty cop films and crime thrillers of a decade ago to telling more stories about social issues and underserved communities. “When I take part in these stories, I’m going back to the basics: exploring what it means to be a person, searching for love and having sympathy for other people,” she says.

Coming up, she wants to take on roles that would upend her image as a gentle person and return to her first love: theatre. “In a theatre, the actress is partially the director who edits the live performance by determining her own pacing and delivery,” she says. “Films, on the other hand, are romantic—like wine, they ‘age’. In ten or 20 years, when you watch them again, what you experience from films will change according to your age and the different social conditions.”

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Kiranjeet Gill: model championing change

Kiranjeet Gill enjoys her various jobs: primary school teacher, model and, above all, actress. “When I work as a teacher, I talk in a certain way with the kids. But when it comes to movies, I can for a second forget who I am and bring out many different personalities,” she says. “I don’t want to sound like a psychopath, but that’s what I enjoy.”

She was particularly overjoyed when she landed a role in Hong Kong drama The Sunny Side of the Street. Set for release in April, it features established local actor Anthony Wong as a troubled taxi driver who meets a young refugee whose world crumbles after his father dies in a car crash. Gill, who is Sikh, plays the boy’s mother, a Pakistani Muslim. “It’s a story about love and concession despite differences,” she says.

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During the production process, there were times when Gill suggested edits to the script when the representation of her character’s community wasn’t accurate. For example, there was originally a scene of abortion. “In Islam, women don’t consider it at all. Showing that was too much,” she says. “So I told the director that we should change it because people [from the community] will watch the movie too and will question it.” The director took Gill’s advice and cut it from the final version. “I felt that the movie was a soft way to educate local people,” she adds.

As a teacher, too, she embraces this desire to educate about other cultures: a few years ago, Gill was teaching at a kindergarten where her class was drawing Christmas cards. When she asked a boy if the Christmas card was for her, he said, without malice, “No, you can’t get a Christmas card because you’re Black.” Rather than take offence, Gill sees it as an opportunity to educate him on how people of different cultures can celebrate the occasion too. “He came back the next day and brought me a Christmas card and told me, ‘Oh, now I understand, and I didn’t mean that.’ That made me feel good,” she recalls. “It is so important to get this message out there, as not everyone has the chance to interact with people from different backgrounds.” As an actress, she hopes that her audiences can similarly learn about her community and their experiences.

But it doesn’t help when Hong Kong’s film industry tends to cast non-Chinese actors of colour in roles with negative connotations, such as terrorists or criminals. “That hinders our opportunity to play bigger or fun roles. There are different people in the community and they can play certain roles [equally] as well [as local Chinese actors]. The industry people have to start normalising that aspect.”

Gill’s struggle as an actress and model also comes from her community, where her occupations aren’t common career options for women. “For the older generation, [dressing up and posing are] a culture shock,” she says. “But as the younger generation, I’m breaking the cultural norms.” She is also keen to set an example to other young women that following a passion is an acceptable way to live, as she does with her modelling. “Life is not all about paying your bills or satisfying your parents. You need to take a lead in your life and do whatever that makes you happy.” She adds that she is grateful for all the opportunities she has been given and wants to show that it is possible turn your dream into a career despite all the setbacks.

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Her independent personality and feistiness are inspired by her idols Gurmit Kaur and Yasmeen Ghauri, two South Asian supermodels who took the fashion industry in the 1990s by storm. “They didn’t care what other people say. They did what they did. Now, they are really big,” she says. She also admires Hong Kong-based Filipina actress Crisel Consunji, who was nominated for Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards for her role as a domestic helper in Still Human, for speaking up for her community.

Gill hopes to continue working in the film industry and serving as a role model for young women. After all, she has a big dream to pursue: as well as becoming the next Marvel superhero, she hopes that “I can also inspire other girls to step out of their comfort zone to carry on with their passion and do something”.

Natalie Hsu: dancing queen

By the age of 18, Hong Kong actress Natalie Hsu already had an impressive CV: music videos for Mirror member Edan Lui and singer Leo Ku, an advertising campaign, film credits in a 2022 horror film that stars Fala Chen, a 2023 action crime thriller that also features Chrissie Chau, and the lead role in Chinese musical film The Day We Lit Up The Sky (2021), for which she won Best Newcomer Award at the Chinese Japan International Film Festival, a subsidiary of The Tokyo International Film Festival, in 2021.

In January, she turned 19, and in the same month took the lead role in Hong Kong drama My First of May, playing a young woman who suffers from a degenerative genetic disease that has made her quadriplegic. She needs help walking, eating, going to the bathroom and getting into bed, meaning her parents, played by Aaron Kwok and Gigi Leung, must give up their own dreams to take care of her.

Months before they started shooting, Hsu and the production team met two girls who suffer from this condition. “It was an eye-opening experience because both of them were so positive and resilient, which are traits I saw in and could apply to my character.” Before filming, Hsu also watched a lot of short documentaries about and read up on cases of people with this condition to learn how they move, speak and eat. “I also wore a corset on set to limit my movement and had practice sessions with the wheelchair,” she recalls. The actress says the research not only enabled her to better portray the subtle physicality of individuals with the condition, but also helped her to understand “the multiple aspects of what it is, and how it can affect you in the most trivial ways and the people around you” whose lifestyles and priorities have to change to accommodate or take care of you.

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The experience was unexpectedly fulfilling, and Hsu found that it gave her an opportunity to spread a positive message despite the heavy nature of the film. “It’s actually less about the illness but more about using my character as a way to explore the way lives can affect and impact each other,” she says. “I think about how, as we’re all here on Earth, we might as well help each other make this shared experience of life as good as possible and help each other become the best versions of ourselves.”

The role was a world away from Hsu’s more familiar territory of singing and dancing. The actress has been learning ballet since she was three, before she moved on to contemporary, jazz and hip-hop dance. “I’ve always loved movement and music,” she says, citing Lin-Manuel Miranda—best known for the Broadway musicals Hamilton and In the Heights, and writing the songs for the upcoming film remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid—as her idol.

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It was also dance that paved her way into the entertainment industry. In the summer of 2020, Hsu was about to embark on her secondary school IB studies, and planned to take theatre studies—but then she received a message from Kim Chou, a friend of Hsu’s mother, former actress Ann Bridgewater. Chou was having lunch with Zhang Yibai, the director of The Day We Lit Up the Sky, who had been searching for two years to no avail for someone to play the lead role—a downtrodden schoolgirl with dreams of winning a dance competition.

“I literally sent everything [showing my performance skills] I could find [on my laptop]. I even sent a K-pop cover I did in my parents’ bedroom,” Hsu recalls. With her cheerful nature, passion for dance and sophisticated dancing skills, Hsu was the perfect candidate. It only took another 10-minute call to seal the deal.

The following week, Hsu quit school to join the production. She had to brush up her Mandarin and catch up on the weeks of rehearsals that the rest of the cast had already been through. But her dance background helped her with developing the body language and posture for her role.

Hsu says, despite not having planned to follow in her mother’s footsteps, she is ready to take on more of what the industry has to offer. Her next step is to learn more about Hong Kong cinema; the Gen Z actress likes “the fleeting nature of shooting on real film” as happened in the 1980s and 1990s. “Filmmakers had to just film, develop [the reels] and see how they came out. That makes it so raw and honest,” she says with a hint of nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t even born. “Everyone went to the cinema at the weekend; the movie culture was stronger. I feel that led creators to be more willing to push the boundaries.”

As for her next roles? “I would like to try a period piece like Tony Leung’s Where the Wind Blows, or something more rebellious, or maybe another sweet and light-hearted coming-of-age film, kind of like the first one I did. Basically everything."

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