Lost and Found

Lam Hui is the daughter of a wealthy family. She works at her father's shipping company and her life is orderly. She is diagnosed with leukaemia. She tells nobody. She meets a sailor working on a ship and is drawn to him; then he disappears. To find him she goes to a company. It is called Lost and Found; its owner Ah Chun says he finds everything that is lost. Ah Chun starts looking. The more he looks, the clearer it becomes that this man is not what needs to be found. Lee Chi-Ngai directs. Kelly Chen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Michael Wong are in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production. It was Kelly Chen's first film. It came from a company prominent in Hong Kong independent cinema of the period and sat outside the genre conventions. Its form is episodic; narration, letters and interior speech are used together. Part of it was shot in Scotland and the location works inside the narrative. The matter it treats is the act of searching itself; the film says outright that looking matters more than finding. The narrative does not use the illness as dramatic material and the character does not pity herself. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow and some sections come apart. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong cinema of the nineties and quiet romantic drama. Who it is not for: it is slow, loosely structured, and the ending sad.