CHICAGO PREMIERE 

The debut feature of Chinese American writer-director Constance Tsang delivers a delicately wrought portrait of working-class sisterhood in New York’s immigrant enclave of Flushing Chinatown.  

Amy (Wu Ke-Xi), Taiwanese, and Didi (Haipeng Xu), Mainland Chinese, share a closeness that alleviates the drudgery and commonplace abuses of their jobs at a massage parlor. Didi dreams of one day opening a restaurant in Baltimore, where her young daughter resides, and has started seeing lonesome married man Cheung (Tsai Ming-liang collaborator Lee Kang-sheng, Rebels of a Neon God, What Time Is It There? The River), a Taiwanese laborer also dislocated from family. When violence suddenly transpires, placing the film into before and after parts, the perspective shifts, darkness sets in, and one character’s story subtly substitutes for another’s. Blue Sun Palace is an assured and quietly affecting first feature that has earned Constance Tsang the French Touch Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week.