Summer Snow

Ann Hui's film opens with May Sun, in her forties. She works and runs the household, and then her father-in-law is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and the care falls to her as well. He used to be authoritarian and distant, and as the illness progresses what is between them goes somewhere entirely different. The film turns the illness into neither tragedy nor uplift, showing it inside daily life with its funny and its exhausting sides together. The burden of care landing on women is in the narrative too, not as a thesis but as life itself. Josephine Siao won the Silver Bear in Berlin for the part; the film took another prize at the same festival and six Hong Kong Film Awards the following year.