Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
Spirit Play
Dir. Danny Yung, Nerve Hui
Hong Kong 2011, 8’
Subtitles: Polish & English
Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits - Inspired by the theater work of the same title by the late Singaporean director Mr KUO, Pao Kun, the original story is about a group of spirits at the Japanese Cemetery in Singapore which confess their deaths at the Pacific War. In this Hong Kong-Nanjing-Tokyo joint venture, theatre practitioners across cultural backgrounds will experiment the combination of Kunqu opera and Noh theatre, while addressing the issues of war and memory. This is a dialogue between human beings of the past and future.
Danny Yung
An experimental art pioneer and one of Hong Kong’s most influential artists, Yung is a founding member and co-artistic director of Zuni Icosahedron. In the past 40 years, Yung has been working extensively in diverse fields of arts, including theatre, cartoon, film, video as well as visual and installation art.
Yung has been involved in over 100 theatre productions as director, scriptwriter, producer and/or stage designer. His theatre works were staged in multiple cities across the world. In 2008, in response to a commission from the Hong Kong Arts Festival, he created Tears of the Barren Hill, a theatre work reflecting on the innovation of traditional Chinese theatre and the institution of cultural exchange, which earned him the Music Theatre NOW Award of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo, Yung, in collaboration with the renowned Japanese theatre director Satō Makoto, showed The Tale of the Crested Ibis, a cultural exchange project which combined, for the first time, elements of noh and kunqu theatres as well as traditional arts and cutting-edge (robot) technology. The annual Toki Festival, curated by Yung since 2012, develops the concept of the Crested Ibis, or Toki, in an effort to enrich young kunqu performers’ experience and promote exchanges between contemporary and traditional performing arts in Asian regions.
The artist keeps a close eye on the arts and cultural policy and on education development in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. He currently serves as chairman of the Hong Kong–Taipei–Shenzhen–Shanghai City-to-City Cultural Exchange Conference and a member of the Design Council of Hong Kong. He was also appointed the inaugural Dean’s Master Artist in Drama of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2013, and he on the Management Board of the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity and the advisory boards of the Department of Cultural Studies of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University and the School of Drama of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
In 2009, Yung was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his achievements and contributions to cultural exchanges between Germany and Hong Kong.
Filmography
1998 Memorandum of the Rock (short)
2003 In Search of Modern China (short)
2009 Interviewing Danny Yung (short)
2011 Spirits Play (short)
2021 Interrupted Dream 2021 (short)
Cast & Crew
Director: Danny Yung, Nerve Hui
Cast: Shimizu Kanji, Matsushima Makoto, Yang Yang, Sun Jing, Xu Sijia, Tang Qin
