About 10 years ago, Hong Kong director Patrick Tam heard a story about a father who trained his son to be a thief. Tam realized the potential of this touching tale and over the past decade made it his mission to write the perfect script. He revised it at least eight times before he started filming. Tam's hard work paid off when his drama dominated Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Awards.

The film After This Our Exile (Fu Zi), based on the story, was nominated for seven awards and won the Best Feature Film, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. It already garnered the Best Artistic Contribution award and Best Asian Film prize at the Tokyo International film festival a month ago.

It has been 17 years since Tam, the mentor of Wong Kar-wai and a signature figure of Hong Kong's new wave cinema in the 1980s, directed his last film. Since the 1990s, he has been living and teaching film studies in Malaysia.

The film is set in a Malaysian village and believes the family drama is something that can be appreciated by audience in "any time and any place."

He says the film is about how broken families pass their pain through to the next generation. Although the child is one of the protagonists, in Tam's words, Exile is not a children's film.

"It is too pessimistic for children," Tam said. "But I want to let the audience know there are many people who are like the father in the film living in this world.

"We should stop such things from happening. I don't want to criticize anyone, I just want to tell a story, and hope the audience will think for a while after seeing it."

One of the most thought-provoking characters is the gambler father, played by Aaron Kwok, a former 1980s Hong Kong teen pop star still popular today.

Kwok is proving he's more than just a pretty face with his gritty performance, which earned him this year's Golden Horse Best Actor award and follows last year's Best Actor award for his role in Divergence (Sanchakou).

"The role is Kwok's best movie performance ever," said Tam. "He is full of potential and able to reveal the complex of the character."

To make the performance more believable, Kwok adopted a full immersion technique employed by many successful actors, such as Russell Crowe and Sean Penn.

He grew a moustache, wore worn-out clothes, changed the way he talked and often would stay silent for days during filming. Very few would have recognized the Hong Kong superstar. The naturally gentle, open and talkative man transformed himself to a rude, introverted and unhappy father.

"I am actually a person who loves to talk, but I stayed silent all day long when trying to understand the role. My friends didn't recognize me, they were astonished," Kwok said.

One of the most powerful scenes involved Kwok crying for two minutes. He said it was the longest he's ever had to cry. What surprised Kwok and the crew was his inability to stop crying even when the filming finished. "I really feel the character's tragedy," he said.

Kwok, 40, does not have children and has no experience of being a father. "At first I did not know how to play a father, nor could I copy my own father, because he is a very good father, unlike the one in the film," he said.

"But being an actor, you need to have great power of imagination and creation, and use that in your acting."

Although all his efforts have been rewarded by a second Best Actor honour, Kwok seems a bit scared by the father's role.

"I found one should think carefully before becoming a father," he said. "For me, work is now more important than family, but I believe I will be a good father."

Ian Gouw, the 9-year-old boy who plays Kwok's son, also has very impressive performance, which makes him the youngest best supporting actor in Golden Horse's history.

The film has three different versions for Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

The version Chinese mainland audience will see today will be about 120 minutes, 40 minutes shorter than the complete version. The sex scenes have been deleted, because there are no film ratings in Chinese mainland yet.

"The complete 160-minute version is the best in my opinion," Tam said, "but there is no need to worry about other versions' quality, for I edited all of them myself. The audience won't miss anything good."

"After This Our Exile" is being released between the premieres of two costume epics, namely A Battle of Wits (Mo Gong) and Curse on the Golden Flower (Mancheng Jindai Huangjinjia).

Tam is not worried about his serious art house flick being swamped by the two blockbusters.

"The audience will resonate with a family drama," he said, "and I will not choose a bad story to declare my return after 17 years."

(China Daily November 30, 2006)