Cecilia Yip and Rebecca Li Manxuan represented two generations of talent when they appeared at this year’s Kering Women in Motion session in Shanghai and they turned their attention to how they saw the Chinese film industry had evolved.
Yip first emerged in Chinese-language cinema in the early 1980s – winning the best actress gone at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Hong Kong 1941 (1984) – and recalled how she was immediately struck by the objectification of the actresses she worked with, as much as herself. But times, she said, had slowly changed.
“They used to refer to us as ‘flower vases’,” said Yip. “It caused me a lot of distress but it is not a phrase you hear anymore. Women roles these days carry real depth.”
Li – nominated in Shanghai for the Best Actress in the Asian New Talent Awards foe her turn in Like, Happy, Love in 2023 – said she had learned to trust her talents, and to persevere, and that now she was being offered “characters with layers.”
“It’s not like [success] is going to happen right away,” she said. “Sometimes a little bit of failure at the beginning may strengthen our motivation and let us know which aspects we can do better.”
