General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Way We Are (天水围的日与夜)

The Way We Are (天水围的日与夜, literally "Day and Night in Tin Shui Wai") is a 2008 Hong Kong drama film directed by Ann Hui (许鞍华), set in the Tin Shui Wai public housing new town in Hong Kong's New Territories and following the quiet daily life of a widowed supermarket worker, her teenage son, and an elderly neighbor¹^•². Made on a low budget with an early digital camera, it counters the district's media reputation as a "city of sadness" by showing ordinary domestic routines, and it won four awards at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2009¹^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Ann Hui, 2008, Hong Kong, in Cantonese¹
Setting	Tin Shui Wai, a public housing new town in the northwestern New Territories labeled the "City of Sadness" after a series of family tragedies⁴
Principal cast	Paw Hee-ching as the widow Kwai (Mrs. Cheung), Leung Chun-lung as her son Ka-on, Chan Lai-wun as the neighbor Foon⁵^•⁶
Production	Screenplay Lou Shiu-wa; cinematography Charlie Lam; music Charlotte Chan; presented by Mega-Vision Pictures, produced by Ann Hui and Wong Yat Ping⁷^•³
Format	Shot on HD digital video on a TV-movie-scale budget; about 90 minutes (some sources list 91)⁷^•⁸
2009 Hong Kong Film Awards	Best Director (Ann Hui), Best Screenplay (Lou Shiu-wa), Best Actress (Paw Hee-ching), Best Supporting Actress (Chan Lai-wun); Best Film went to Ip Man³^•⁹
Companion film	Night and Fog (2009), a darker Tin Shui Wai film made from the same research into a 2004 family tragedy¹⁰

Spoilers

Story and approach

The film centers on Kwai (贵姐), a middle-aged widow who works in a neighborhood supermarket and lives with her son Ka-on, a recent secondary-school examination candidate drifting through post-exam idleness. A newly arrived older woman, Foon (梁欢), who has taken a job at the same supermarket on the strength of her vegetable-selling experience, gradually enters their routines, and the three fold into one another's daily lives through shared meals, errands, and small favors¹^•⁸. The Golden Horse Festival synopsis adds that Kwai in her youth sacrificed her own prospects to raise two younger brothers, a backstory the film delivers through family gatherings and old photographs rather than dramatized conflict¹¹.

Peter Zarrow, a historian of modern China at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, describes the film's method as showing "the quotidian, extremely ordinary events in the lives of a few characters, gradually revealing how they came to be the persons they are," with the camera alternating between distant views of Hong Kong's high-rise infrastructure and close, face-to-face views of its inhabitants². The film contains almost no conventional plot: shopping, cooking, work shifts, exam results, and a shared durian accumulate into a portrait of community through repetition rather than crisis⁸.

Tin Shui Wai and the "City of Sadness"

Tin Shui Wai is a public housing new town developed from the 1980s in the northwest of the New Territories, planned as Hong Kong's eighth new town with planning work beginning in 1982, and located about one kilometer northwest of Yuen Long¹². Its apartment blocks were built in the late 1980s on the site of an old fishermen's district to house the city's poorest residents, and the district soon acquired a bad media reputation, with news reports of unemployment, domestic violence, murders, and suicides¹³.

The "City of Sadness" label entered official discourse in 2006, when, after the suicide of three young women in the district, a senior Social Welfare Department official used the phrase and was then criticized for offering no real solution to the underlying social problems⁴. Hui said she wanted to give Tin Shui Wai residents a chance to tell the outside world that they were not that depressed¹⁴. The film's opening uses black-and-white images of the northwestern New Territories wetlands that existed before the town was built, a visual record of the area's pre-urbanization past¹.

Production and release

Origins in another project. Ann Hui was shaken by a 2004 case in which a family of four died in Tin Shui Wai. She visited the estate, known at the time as "the City of Sadness in the Great Northwest," attended the dead woman's funeral in Shenzhen, and learned about the family's circumstances while seeking funding for a film based on the case¹⁰. That project became Night and Fog (2009); The Way We Are was made first, as a by-product of the investigation, on a limited budget and shot entirely with an HD video camera, which gave the drama a documentary feeling⁴. The Festival des 3 Continents notes it was originally produced for television-movie purposes before meeting with critical and public success⁷.

The film had its world premiere at the 32nd Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2008 and opened in Hong Kong cinemas on 17 July 2008¹⁵^•¹⁶. It was re-released on 30 April 2009 after its awards success¹⁷. Because it was shot digitally, it could not enter the Golden Horse Awards, which at the time required 35mm prints, a restriction Taiwanese fans later described as a regret¹⁸.

Reception and honors

At the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards in April 2009, the film took four major awards: Best Director for Ann Hui, Best Screenplay for Lou Shiu-wa, Best Actress for Paw Hee-ching, and Best Supporting Actress for Chan Lai-wun, while losing Best Film to the biopic Ip Man³^•⁹. Paw Hee-ching's win was noted as the first Best Actress award for a Hong Kong local actress since the CEPA trade agreement took effect, after mainland actresses had dominated co-production roles⁴. The film also won Best Film and Best Director at the 15th Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards¹⁷, and in 2011 it was included in the Golden Horse Festival's list of the 100 greatest Chinese-language films¹¹.

Critics placed the film in a realist lineage: the Five Flavours festival notes that Hui's style here was compared to that of Yasujiro Ozu¹³, and a 2025 screenwriting study by Ian Fong of the University of Hong Kong reads it as a film about ordinary women "imprisoned" by Hong Kong's urban planning, whose symbolic richness grows on rereading¹⁹. Together with Night and Fog, it forms a two-part portrait of Tin Shui Wai: the former capturing everyday life in a plain, descriptive style, the latter dramatizing a domestic violence tragedy in the same district²⁰.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2006 to 2009

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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