Why Hong Kong director Ray Yeung wrote another LGBTQ+ film ‘All Shall Be Well’ after ‘Suk Suk’

“When I asked them to play a gay part, they were quite worried. The first thing they said was, ‘Why me? What makes you think that I want to do this? What makes you think I look like a gay man?’ Other times, you have bizarre responses: ‘I played a gay man once, so I don’t have to do it again.’ I [replied], ‘You played a detective 29 times and you’re still doing it?’” he says. “These questions are quite homophobic.”

Yeung ended up reaching out to local theatre actors and came across Ben Yuen, who had just finished shooting Tracey. Yuen agreed to play Hoi, one of the leads in Suk Suk, after reading the script. As for the other role, Pak, Yeung had to fly to Taiwan to convince Tai Bo to accept the part, because “I basically couldn’t find anyone in Hong Kong to do it. [Some people I approached] said they were interested, but they wouldn’t do any kissing or sex scenes, and they wouldn’t do a million things. Some even asked me, ‘Do they have to be gay? Can they just be platonic?’ I thought, ‘Are you writing my story for me?’”

Then there are the box office concerns. “You always get the same answers [from sponsors], that [they don’t want to fund] a niche movie,” he says. “When I was raising funds for Suk Suk, they said a lesbian movie sells better. Now I’m doing All Shall Be Well, they say, ‘Actually, a gay movie sells better.’ You can never win.” The audience reaction is also a hurdle: Yeung says older men in Hong Kong “are reluctant to see Suk Suk because they feel threatened by the subject matter”; the majority of people who saw Suk Suk at the cinema were young and/or female.

The reputation and connections Yeung garnered with his previous films made All Shall Be Well slightly easier to carry off. For example, he convinced Tai to return to play the older brother of protagonist Pat; Au also appeared in Suk Suk. But another reason the film was easier to put together, Yeung explains, is that this queer movie tells a different story which is “in many ways easier for the actresses”. In Suk Suk, sex and cruising are very important elements to the plot; the director was inspired by the book Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong by Travis Kong, an associate professor of sociology at The University of Hong Kong. “But I felt I already dealt with LGBTQ+ age and its issues,” he says. “Here in All Shall Be Well, the two women have been in a relationship for [over 30] years. The film isn’t about the satisfaction the characters gained from sex. It’s really about the relationship between the couple, and the surviving partner’s relationship with the deceased’s family.”

Read more: Pride and Prejudice: Why Is It Still So Hard for the LGBTQ+ Community to Form Families in Hong Kong?

In 2020, Yeung attended a talk about the inheritance rights of LGBTQ+ couples in Hong Kong, where the speaker quoted three cases of long-term couples and how, when one of them died, the surviving partner had lost everything. The speaker introduced Yeung to the people involved in the cases, who inspired the script for All Shall Be Well. In Yeung’s story, Pat’s family is very open and supportive, but after Pat dies, everything changes. “It explores the meaning of family: is it someone related by blood? Or someone you spend many years with and share a life with? Which is more important? How does our legal system address this or not?” he asks. “It also explores homophobia: Hong Kong society now seems to be more open; in the movie, it looks like the couple is being accepted by their families on the surface. But when one of them dies, her family can throw her partner out of the family overnight. All the people I interviewed from the three cases had the same experience; some of them were on holidays with their [partners’] family members, but pretty soon, they became enemies.”

Yeung admits that serious social subjects don’t attract as much marketing money as the action movies or crime thrillers which Hong Kong is known for—and he has to teach film classes and do television commercial work on the side to make ends meet—but he feels the times have changed for the local film industry. “We have new audiences who are interested in movies which aren’t purely entertainment,” he says, arguing that if they focus only on entertainment, Hong Kong commercial films will not be able to compete on a global level; they cannot outdo the Marvel-ness of a Marvel movie. Besides, he adds, tastes have changed. “Gangster movies were popular in the 1990s, but the audience today find that very foreign. How many gangsters do we know [or can people relate to]? They want to watch movies that concern them.”

The director is submitting All Shall Be Well to international film festivals, with Berlin having been the first stop, and hopes that this will generate interest in and recognition for independent Hong Kong productions, first abroad and then gradually in his home city.

“My film is part of that movement which is catering for an audience who are more concerned about society and how we can all improve it,” he says. But that doesn’t always have to be through serious productions about minority rights. “I want to take on comedy. Like my previous films, I just have to convince people that I can do it.”

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