words rachel mok

Jacob Cheung finds understanding in awkward choices and difficult relationships

Upon learning I had seen Ticket prior to our interview, director Jacob Cheung gives an unexpected response: “Boring, huh?” he says. I deny any such notion, but understand the director’s concern. After all, adapted from the short novel written by Taiwanese scholar Lee Chia-tung, Ticket is a 110-minute film with neither stars nor gimmicks but lots of tears centred on parental love. Reflecting Tolstoy’s epigram ‘Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’, the filmmaker wanted to explore love in troublesome family situations.

Cheung first came across the story back in 1998 after finishing The Kid. “I was thinking what kind of story I wanted to tell. I wanted to find a story related to me and which could move me and the audience,” says the Hong Kong Film Awards’ Best Director. “I think there are a lot of things around us that we don’t know how to treasure, so that would be a good message to pass on.” He started looking at stories in newspapers and comics but found what he was looking for when a friend suggested he search out a short novel titled Mama’s Tickets (a literal translation) online. At first he wanted a female director for it but, failing to find one, put the project on hold until he saw how his 2006 movie A Battle of Wits fared.

After that film’s success, he considered making a quick, technically undemanding film before his next blockbuster and dug out the script of Ticket again. It would be easier, he thought, to raise funds for it on the back of his winner – “After A Battle of Wits both the audience and investors know me better,” he says – and he was right. The project raised $10 million, a large sum for the kind of film he intended to make.

Mainly shot in Yunan and Tibet, the film centres on a young woman’s journey to find the mother who abandoned her as an infant. But Cheung enriched that story with parallel plots, one about a couple’s decision to give birth to a child even though a congenital heart disease means it would most likely not survive, and another on a single father and his autistic son.

Cheung concedes that dramas of this type have been off the local film industry radar now for some time but is unconcerned about the box office take for this particular movie. “Sometimes a film is not too successful because the director chooses to tell the story in a way that the mass audience cannot comprehend,” he says. “It is the director’s responsibility, not the genre.”

From his directorial debut in Last Eunuch in China (1988), Jacob Cheung has become known for his sensitivity in portraying human relationships, so Ticket with its questions about love could be seen as a kind of signature film for the director. “We should never doubt the love of parents – they can give up everything for their children,” he says. “But we may question their way of showing it. Other than love itself, how to love is also what we should think deeply about.”

However, notwithstanding A Battle of Wits, audiences will probably remember Cheung best for the film that garnered him the best director and screenplay awards at the 1992 Hong Kong Film Awards – Cageman – and they may well be expecting him to come up with another such Hong Kong story. They could be disappointed. The director says he is happy to see filmmakers such as Ann Hui, Lawrence Lau and Jonnie To make films on subjects familiar to Hongkongers, but he thinks he should try something else. “It is a choice. For example if I want to talk about war, it would be difficult if I want to relate it to Hong Kong, right?”

But whether it is a Hong Kong movie or not, he believes that, film being the influential medium it is, any cinematic project should make a meaningful social impact. He uses poverty and the divide between rich and poor as an example. “Should [a film] widen the difference and gap, or should it find our spirit in life? We really need to find the right way to tell a story.”

Ticket will open on October 23.