EAFFI: Flowers of Shanghai

CLUB 18+113 min

Synopsis

East Asia Film Festival Ireland (EAFFI) is delighted to present Flowers of Shanghai (1998) in a beautiful digital 4K restoration for the Lunar New Year 2025: Year of the Snake.

Flowers of Shanghai is a hypnotic human comedy based on Han Ziyun’s 1894 masterpiece novel, Hai Shang Hua. Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien (EAFFI guest of honour, 2017) and scripted by Chu Tien-Wen, it depicts life in the elegant brothels or ‘flower houses’ found in Shanghai’s foreign concessions in the late Qing dynasty in 1884, where prominent figures were received by ‘flower girls’, in an enclosed world with its own codes, money negotiations, romantic intrigues, and tensions. Told though a series of vignettes shot in exquisite long takes by Hou’s long time collaborator, Mark Lee Ping-Bing creates a ‘glamorous realism’ of lush, gilded, gas-lit interiors and close-range details of the smallest gestures and facial expressions. This is one of Hou’s most celebrated and most stunning works.