The Arch

This re-embraced, newly 4K-restored masterwork – made when its director was just 27 – was one of the earliest independent arthouse films in Hong Kong.

In Qing dynasty China, the young widow Madame Tung has been such a symbol of virtue as mother and schoolteacher that the emperor has decreed she will receive an honorary arch erected at the entrance to her rural mountain village. When the soldier Captain Yang arrives to oversee the project, he and Tung share a clear connection. But when Tung’s daughter, Wei-Ling, signals a romantic interest in the captain, the widow must weigh her own happiness against her social standing and her daughter’s future.

T'ang was only 27 and an outsider to Hong Kong’s film industry when she made The Arch – shot by Satyajit Ray’s cinematographer Subrata Mitra and edited by celebrated American documentarian Les Blank (Burden of Dreams, MIFF 1982) – to achieve a unique vision that went on to win four Golden Horse Awards. Headlined by a sterling lead performance from a young Lisa Lu Yan (The Joy Luck Club), this gorgeous portrait of longing and what the director described as “the interior feeling of women” is at once classical and radical, climaxing in an avant-garde final-reel montage that summons all of cinema’s expressive power. Historically underseen and overlooked, The Arch has recently gained increasing recognition – highlighted in Mark Cousins’s Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (MIFF 2020), and now made available for rediscovery through this new restoration, direct from its Cannes premiere.

“One of the most magical tricks of cinema is that there is no such thing as an old film. You start to unspool The Arch from 1968 and you’re right there. The screen is like a cleansing board, and time evaporates.” – Tilda Swinton