The Arch

With THE ARCH, T’ang Shushuen, often cited as the first female film director of Hong Kong, delivered an exceptionally bold debut. Drawing on a popular 17th-century Chinese story, she reshaped it into a claustrophobic portrait of womanhood in which desire, duty, and social control are in constant conflict. This inner pressure is also expressed through form: using dissolves, freeze frames, and visual repetition, T’ang adopts a distinctly avant-garde arthouse language that makes emotional tension and repression palpable. For her debut, she also enlisted two remarkable collaborators: her fellow student Les Blank edited the film, while Subrata Mitra—the longtime cinematographer of Satyajit Ray, whom T’ang greatly admired—handled the interior cinematography.

Set in Ming-dynasty China, the film centers on Madam Tung, a young widow living with her teenage daughter Wei Lingand her mother-in-law. She leads a chaste and exemplary life and is held in such high esteem that the village plans to honor her with a ceremonial arch—an imperial distinction for exceptional virtue. When an officer and his soldiers request lodging in her home, a mutual attraction develops between him and Madam Tung. Out of dignity and self-restraint, she suppresses her feelings, but the balance shifts when Wei Ling seduces the officer. Madam Tung ultimately resigns herself, reluctantly, to a marriage between her daughter and the man—a seemingly noble sacrifice that begins to erode her inner equilibrium.

As a parable, THE ARCH exposes how women’s lives are constrained by traditional norms and how desire is dismissed in favor of suffocating conformism. The film is regarded as an early independent Hong Kong production with international resonance, widely praised for its emotional complexity and formal audacity. Following its screening in Cannes in 1969, THE ARCH became a reference point, and T’ang Shushuen was recognized as a crucial pioneer in Chinese and Hong Kong film history. Yet for decades the film remained largely unseen in Europe: aside from a handful of festival screenings at the time, it never received a European theatrical release and has therefore never before been shown in Belgium. These two screenings thus offer a rare opportunity to encounter a key work of film history—a formally adventurous, emotionally powerful pioneering film that was overlooked for far too long and is now finally claiming its rightful place in the canon.

T’ang Shushuen made only four feature films (THE ARCH, CHINA BEHIND, SUP SAP BUP DUP and THE HONG KONG TYCOON), yet her influence on Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s and 1980s—and on later generations—was exceptionally significant. She introduced socially critical art cinema to Hong Kong and founded the city’s first serious film journal, Close-Up, in 1976.

The film was recently restored in 4K by the Hong Kong museum M+, using original 35mm prints from the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (University of California) and the BFI National Archive. Scanning, restoration, and color grading were carried out at Silver Salt Restoration, in the presence and under the supervision of T’ang Shushuen herself.

THE ARCH is one of the films that are part of ‘M+ Restored’, an initiative supported by CHANEL.