Lilian LEE: Confronting Fate Through Imagination and Desire – MulanIFF2025
Author: SHEN Wei
As a bestselling author, Lilian LEE Pik-wah is renowned for her wildly imaginative, phantasmagorical tales that drift between reality and illusion. Her characters are often entangled in love, death, and reincarnation, imbued with a deep sense of Eastern fatalism. At the same time, she is one of the most singular screenwriters of Hong Kong cinema’s golden age, expanding the imaginative boundaries of commercial film. Between romance and horror, Lee has built an aesthetic and emotional universe that belongs not only to Hong Kong, but to the wider Sinophone sphere.
She weaves the weight of history into a dreamlike backdrop for love and solitude. In her stories, protagonists do not resist the pull of passion—regardless of identity, orientation, or moral code. Human fragility emerges from the mist with a quiet, tragic force. Her stories belong as much to the screen as they do to dreams, to vanished time. The timeless screen personas of Anita MUI, Leslie CHEUNG, Maggie CHEUNG, Joey WONG, and GONG Li have been immortalized through Lee’s writing—becoming some of the most dazzling, haunting images of a generation.
Though tales of demons, gods and ghosts have long flourished in Chinese literary tradition, they were often banished to the margins by the Confucian admonition to “the wise speak not of strange forces.” Many such stories remain, but their authors are long forgotten. In the century-long of Chinese-language cinema, realist aesthetics and progressive themes reign as orthodoxy, but the power of imagination never truly fades. Lee carries forward that lineage—where fantasy reflects reality—infusing it with modern consciousness and a distinctly female gaze. With her restored classics returning to the big screen, generation after generation continues to find echoes of longing and wonder in her visions—where dreams and desire still shimmer, just beyond reach.
