A Night Over All Nights

The biggest challenge I faced while directing this short film was my lack of professional knowledge and practical experience at the time. My decision to start filming stemmed from an urgent desire to gain experience.
As a typical modern East Asian youth, I grapple with anxiety, sadness, and a loss of faith. Seeking the meaning of life has always been a central theme for me, and the relationship between resisting alienation and achieving self-realisation has gradually become an unavoidable issue, which I naturally wanted to incorporate into my film. I chose to focus on a hostess as the film’s protagonist because I find this group fascinating. Contrary to the depictions in other films and media, hostesses are not always downtrodden or forced into this line of work due to a lack of education or other options. I see the hostess as a complex figure, whose work seems to offer a way to cheat alienation, with a significant degree of freedom in managing work-life balance. However, in the context of neoliberalism, the pursuit of freedom inevitably becomes burdensome. In both my real life and fictional narrative, the myth of self-empowerment collapses.I’ve woven these psychological conflicts into the protagonist’s internal struggles while creating external dramatic tension suited to the character and situation, thereby offering a reflection on some of the modern afflictions we face today.