Gerry Mullany, writing for the NY Times:
Ms. Lau, 34, a Hong Kong native, was educated at Columbia University, majoring in economics and working at Morgan Stanley before going to film school in London. As she returned to Hong Kong, she saw a city constantly changing, but one increasingly riven by economic inequality fueled by its growing prosperity. “At first, it was the Filipino domestic helpers’ situation that interested me,” she wrote in an email about the university graduates who had to leave their country to take up domestic work in Hong Kong.
“As I found out more,” she added, “it was their stories that touched me and I felt a need to study film as a language to express what I was observing. Since film school, I returned to Hong Kong once again and saw that the class divide — and the Hong Kong versus mainlander divide — was intensifying.”
Her movie captures the opulent lifestyle of the “tai tai,” the term for a prosperous married woman who need not work, a figure who is alternately ridiculed and envied in Hong Kong. In “Bends,” that character, Anna Li, played by Carina Lau (she is not related to the filmmaker), spends her days lunching at pricey restaurants with friends, downing wine at midday and being ferried about by her driver, Fai, played by Chen Kun. Fai has a permit to work in Hong Kong while his pregnant wife raises their daughter across the border in Shenzhen.
Fascinating. Makes me want to see this film!