Director Constance Tsang drew on her youth in Queens and real-life stories from Flushing’s Asian community for the film about two women struggling to get by while working in a massage parlor.
The first feature from director-writer Constance Tsang, the Cannes Critics’ Week Blue Sun Palace, is set in Flushing, Queens, where Chinese migrants Amy and Didi work in a massage parlor and struggle to get by.
There are no drone shots of the Queens skyline, no wide establishing shots of Flushing’s bustling Chinese community. Instead, Tsang frames her subjects tightly, placing them in liminal spaces like stairwells and hallways — “thresholds,” Tsang explains, where they’re “so close to freedom, but it’s never afforded to them.”
“When we talk about spaces in general, I feel like my decision not to do these establishing shots [and instead] to create this feeling of confinement has to do with the way that I think the Chinese community builds itself, especially when they move to America,” Tsang explains. “There’s a really kind of insular, tight-knit choice that they have.”
Tsang discussed her movie, which is screening in the sidebar to the Cannes Fest organized by the French film critics’ union.
She lived with her parents in Flushing until her father died when she was 16. “A lot of their lives happen within this bubble,” she says. “The conversation of freedom and what it really means. That actually has to do with my own perception on the limitations of what these people can achieve here.”
Tsang’s framing also keeps the focus on the endless, invisible work done by Amy and Didi and immigrants like them. Their waking hours are defined by labor, both physical and emotional.
Tsang was familiar with such workers. After her father’s death, her mother began managing commercial properties, such as massage parlors.
Then, as Tsang was writing the script between 2018 and 2022, real-time tragedies also began to inform the story.
“COVID was just happening, the Atlanta spa shootings, the rise of Asian hate crimes,” she recalls. “It all felt like something that was happening around me.”
Tsang also worked with anti-human trafficking consultants He Manqing and Susan Chung, who told her heartbreaking stories of trafficked women, many of whom didn’t speak English.
Who to Call
Some “had been trafficked and didn’t even realize that they were being trafficked,” Tsang says, or shared one cellphone “that they couldn’t even use because they didn’t know who to call.”
However, beyond the painful struggles of women like Amy and Didi, Tsang hopes audiences will recognize their humanity, that “there is a life behind these people, that there is family they have that live far away, that there is loneliness.”
