by Annette Basile
“According to the tradition of Chinese ancestral veneration, living family members of the deceased have a responsibility to care for their family’s ghosts, and pay tribute to them by putting out offerings of food and even money – in the form of joss money, or ‘hell money’ – which is burnt.
“Ghosts whose families have either forgotten or abandoned them are believed to go hungry – hence the term ‘hungry ghosts’ – and are forced to scrounge for whatever they can get or steal from others, potentially causing mischief – especially during Ghost Month, when the Gates of Hell are open and the spirits freely wander the mortal realm.”
Malaysian writer/director We Jun Cho is explaining the basis of his impressive debut feature, the vibrant Hungry Ghost Diner, which, despite its title, is a sweet supernatural tale with no scares and plenty of humour. It centres on Bonnie (singer/actress Keat Yoke Chen), who operates a food truck in KL but finds herself amongst famished phantoms when she returns to her family’s rural cafe and is stranded during Covid lockdown.
The concept of hungry ghosts originated in Indian Buddhist folklore, Cho explains, and Hungry Ghost Diner was inspired by a personal experience. “Like a lot of Asian sons, I never really bonded with my father, who was a site contractor and was rarely home,” he explains. “I wasn’t very close to the paternal side of my family, which resides in a rural town called Slim River, in Perak, Malaysia. When my paternal grandmother passed away … I was somewhat forced to reconnect with my father’s family.”
Despite being hesitant about seeing his paternal family, he was warmly welcomed. “I thought it was ironic that it was a funeral – a commemoration of the dead – which had brought me together with my extended family, not a festive occasion like the Lunar New Year,” he continues. “This led me to reflect on the similarities with one such other festival celebrated by the Chinese diaspora globally – the Hungry Ghost Festival, often feared and misunderstood, and the origins of which are mostly forgotten.”
Hungry Ghost Diner is rich in narrative and visuals, and the after-dark scenes are unusually vibrant. “We took a major creative risk in developing this look,” Cho reveals. “We weren’t sure if audiences were able to accept the aesthetic. It was achieved in collaboration with our cinematographer, Teck Zee Tan, who suggested we do some rather unorthodox things with the visuals for when Bonnie entered the realm of ‘Ghost Hour’.
“Modern cinema cameras are equipped with an IR-cut filter, which as its name suggests, blocks out infrared – IR – wavelength pollution from bleeding into the image and causing the image to look brown or pinkish. In simple terms, light sources that emit heat will produce IR wavelengths that can be picked up by the camera’s sensor, and usually that is undesirable as it creates images that are muddied and colour-inaccurate. However, for these Ghost Hour scenes in Hungry Ghost Diner, we intentionally removed the IR-cut filter and allowed all these light sources to ‘pollute’ our image.”
The result is stunning. Cho is a gifted filmmaker. But his celluloid career path is an atypical one – he originally studied actuarial science in the UK, and later worked in finance.
Discussing his influences, Cho mentions Studio Ghibli, adding that he “grew up watching a lot of TV”, and “was also fed a steady diet of Spielberg, Zemeckis and Tim Burton films” from his father’s movie collection. But it was his time studying at the University of Kent that “was probably instrumental” to his film education…
One day, during a lonely term break, Cho was standing outside the university library when he struck up a conversation with a stranger who told him that his library card would give him access to an “extensive” movie collection. He “binge-watched” on a daily basis, discovering the work of Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, plus indie classics like Donnie Darko and Magnolia. “I must have watched a few hundred films before I graduated – thankfully still having passed my exams – and continued to hoard DVDs well into my late twenties.”
Now in his early forties, and with a clutch of short films under his belt, he is looking forward to more filmmaking adventures. “I’ve started writing again,” he says. “Not sure which of these projects I’m conceptualising will ever see the light of day, but I’m hopeful they will be as rewarding as Hungry Ghost Diner was for me. I hope to be able to approach them with the same sincerity and creative control, but even if I have to make compromises on these new projects, at least I have Hungry Ghost Diner to look back on as a form of expression that is honest and close to my heart, for which I am very grateful.
“We have recovered enough to just about break even on the film. It has been such a rewarding journey to have the privilege of making it and being able to share this film with the world…. I received a handwritten note from an appreciative audience member last month, passed to me by her mother and grandmother who attended a re-run screening, thanking us for the film.
“It moves me to think about three generations being able to share in the same experience –much like how reunion dinners are shared with our family members. It gives a feeling that the project has come full circle for me.”
Hungry Ghost Diner is available now to rent or own on Digital.
