Blue Sun Palace

Inauguración 2025

Blue Sun Palace

Constance Tsang | 2024 | 116′

SYNOPSIS

Constance Tsang’s debut feature film, recipient of the Jury Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week, portrays the everyday lives of two Chinese immigrants in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens, New York, where the director was raised. Many of her personal and family experiences are echoed in the story of Amy and Didi, employees at a massage parlor that lends its name to the film. Bound by a sense of rootlessness, the two women develop a deep friendship that is challenged by an unforeseen tragedy during the Lunar New Year. Furthermore, both are involved with the same married man, played by Taiwanese director and actor Lee Kang Sheng, a frequent collaborator of Tsai Ming-Liang. Melancholic, touching, and humanistic, Blue Sun Palace captures the emotions and drives of this character triangle, marked by the longing for love, mourning, and the search for a place in the world.

Program Information

Day: Tuesday 10th

Hora: 20:30

Sede: Filmoteca

Multimedia

Critical text

The opening of Blue Sun Palace is a formal statement of intent. A camera must attend to two characters, conversing in the intimacy of a restaurant, and rely on sound for the scene to make sense. Its mere presence is not enough to encompass this dual reality; it can only function as a relationship between parts. Thus, Constance Tsang’s debut feature film is built upon the political, social, and geographic tensions inherent to modern-day United States. Amy and Didi, its protagonists, are immigrants from the Chinese community in Queens, forced to make a living by serving American men in a massage parlor. A relationship unbalanced by the logics of patriarchy and capital, yet never feeling forced thanks to the director’s deft touch. Tsang allows her characters to inhabit the space of the camera, to move with a naturalness born of an awareness of the complexity of everyday life. The dramatic situation that threads the story together is felt in the atmosphere, it pulls at the characters, but never dominates them. Not even the muted tones of 16mm film prevent the dynamics between them from being full of life. Perhaps the opposite is true: these almost hostile contexts are not enough to suppress genuine emotion. They end up, in fact, enhancing it. Blue Sun Palace proposes cinema as a relational space where a free dialogue unfolds, seemingly converging in the character played by Lee Kang-Sheng. In him reside the tensions of masculinity, the contrast between his behavior with his wife in China and with Amy and Didi, of the immigrant fleeing his country, and of the working man crushed by debt. This allows the director to conclude the film almost as she began, with a sustained, powerless gaze that reveals the wound of displacement and love. Pablo Fernández Cordón

BIOGRAPHY

Constance Tsang

She is a Chinese American writer, director, and educator based in New York City. She earned an MFA in Screenwriting and Directing from Columbia University, where she was granted the Robert Gore Rifkind Launch Fund. Her short film ‘Eau’ (2021) was chosen by an industry jury at her thesis screening and won the Directors Guild of America’s Jury Prize at the 26th Annual Student Film Awards (East Coast Asian American category). Her earlier short, ‘Carnivore’, was part of the 2018 AT&T Hello Lab project. Her work is supported by the Starlight Stars Collective and Tribeca Film. Her debut feature, ‘Blue Sun Palace’ (2024), premiered at the Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival, where it was honored with the French Touch Jury Prize.