Elizabeth Lo on her Oscar-shortlisted film about China’s ‘mistress dispellers’
Lo’s film explores a little-known Chinese industry, exposing marital crises, gendered social pressures and truths about love, loneliness and agency
When filmmaker Elizabeth Lo is asked which questions she wishes she got more often, she laughs before answering. “I wish people asked more about my other projects, especially Stray,” she tells me, sipping a coffee in Hong Kong, hours before flying back to Los Angeles for a final round of awards season events.
A stray’s gaze, she believes, reveals more about society because it exists outside it. Look from the edge, and you see the whole picture more clearly. For Lo, who says she has always felt like an insider and outsider to both East and West, that perspective has shaped her life and continues to inform her work.
“Because my mom was Chinese-American, growing up in Hong Kong I always felt like an outsider,” she reflects. “But then, when I arrived in the United States to study at NYU, I realised pretty quickly I wasn’t really American either. So being an outsider to both American and Hong Kong society – having no real sense of deep belonging to either place – that’s what draws me to documenting stories of outsiders. I have a lot of empathy for people who feel like they’re looking in on human society from the outside.”
By Lo’s early 30s, that feeling of being different found new weight as another pressure, well known to many women, began to set in. “I was being asked when I would settle down, marry, build a family,” she says. “It’s a pressure that women in China are very familiar with: the stigma of being seen as undesirable.”