Montages of a Modern Motherhood
In her piercingly honest follow-up to Still Human (NYAFF 2019), Oliver Chan Siu-kuen channels her own postpartum reckoning into cinema of rare emotional precision. Hedwig Tam delivers an award-winning performance as Suk-jing, a new mother who escapes each dawn to knead life into bakery dough, only to return to her New Territories flat where her mother-in-law pours breast milk down the drain and her husband awaits applause for changing diapers. Through endless crying and the suffocating rhythm of pump-feed-wash-repeat, Chan builds to Suk-jing's devastating challenge to her mother: 'We sacrifice our careers, our time, our bodies—and what do we get in return?' Finding unexpected sweetness in struggle, Montages of a Modern Motherhood breaks the silence around early motherhood's hidden costs.
