Tracy Choi Ian-Sin

Lok, a 34-year-old filmmaker from Macau, has been drifting through Hong Kong’s film industry. Although she has already directed a feature film, her life remains unstable, her next project has stalled, and her girlfriend Bei Bei is pushing for them to get married, buy a house, and settle down. Facing multiple pressures, Lok revisits different moments in her past: when she was studying in Taiwan aged 22, and when she was growing up in Macau aged 17.

This is a story about how family can impact the growth of a young woman. It follows Elaine, who grew up in poverty in the 1980’s, and her best friend Ying as they enter the Hong Kong entertainment industry to change their fate. In the golden era of Hong Kong cinema, Ying becomes a popular erotic star while Elaine struggles between her identity and her job as an actor. When Hong Kong cinema’s glory fades a decade later, the two women end up on diverging paths due to their life choices.

As Macau approaches its return to China, Sandy, a local girl, meets Qiao Mingzhuang, a university student from Beijing. They share a brief romance, but circumstances and distance cause them to part ways. Years later, their lives intersect once more.

Love intertwines at the wrong time. Sei and Ling, former masseuses in Macau, in retrospect, had the best time together. Decades after, Sei learns that her late best friend has kept a secret she never knew...

"Years of Macau" is an anthology film consisting of nine short films set in different years and locations in Macau. They include "Go Back Home", "REC-Last Days", "Sparkling Mind", "The Last Show", "Till the End of World", "The First Cigarette", "A Moment", "Dirty Laundry" and "Summer". All nine directors are from Macau, most of whom were born and raised here. The stories of each film share what the directors feel about Macau using the language of cinema to convey their love for the city.

A Macau photographed with elegant realism forms the backdrop to the life of Lina, a Chinese immigrant working both as a waitress in a restaurant and as a hostess in a bar in order to save money to join her mother and daughter in China. By chance she meets taxi driver Mada, also an immigrant from China. Both have a past they want to forget and love feels like it might be their last chance to avoid being alone. But as is always the case in a melodrama, the past isn't easily tamed.

Filmmakers love making films about filmmaking, but not many of those films can truly explain where the passion comes from. Who are more qualified to answer this question than the new Master of Fine Arts graduates from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts’ School of Film and Television? In their graduation thesis, award-winning director Man is sentenced to community service for drunken behavior. Assigned to a youth center, Man has to guide a group of eight-to-twelve-year-olds to make a short film. At first, Man feels he’s too good for such an assignment. However, the kids’ enthusiasm and unique perspective of life eventually inspire him to rediscover why he loved filmmaking in the first place.

Coming out of the closet is never easy, especially if you're living in a small city like Macau, where you bump into friends and relatives every day. Two out of the closet girls and their friends and relatives tell their stories.