About Blue Sun Palace

The romantic relationship between a man and a woman in the Chinese community of Queens is disrupted by a sudden disappearance, thus cementing a new, unexpected bond. Rooting her story in a massage parlour staffed with Chinese migrants, Constance Tsang created a beautiful melodrama that explores the feelings of loss, displacement, and exile. With a touching cast, which includes the brilliant Ke-xi Wu, Lee Kang-sheng (Tsai Ming-liang’s favourite actor), and Haipeng Xu, this modern and personal reinterpretation of great tales of grief and loss moves us with its deep and potent tenderness. 

Constance Tsang’s interview

This film is very personal to me because my parents are those migrants in Queens. We lived in Flushing where the film is set. When I began writing Blue Sun Palace, I knew I had wanted to write a story about characters that were far from their homeland, trying to find some sense of permanence in America. 

The specific setting of the massage parlour came during Covid where there was a period of Asian hate crimes in the states, the Atlanta spa shootings, and the death of a massage worker in Flushing.

I loved these actors so much and valued our work together. From the beginning we had conversations about the characters and the story. On set, I like a very collaborative process. We would go through the scenes together, find what the scene was about, then I would tell them to only take what mattered and shed what didn’t. We would read, rehearse, improv and refine.  

My DP Norm Li and I thought about the visual language in a couple of ways but always with the mentality that the visuals were used to serve the story. I didn’t want the film to be stylized but to live in a realism that highlighted the ethos of the film. Living is this combination the beautiful and the sad. All the images, the framing, and composition, are meant to evoke that.

I think about Hitchcock often, so for this film there are in the movie traces of Psycho and Vertigo. There are also films I love like L’Avventura, Suzhou River, and contemporary examples like Drive My Car and Long Day’s Journey into Night where the structure is about an absence. I don’t use these films so much for references only that they inspire a different way I can tell a story - hence the personal.