Echoes of the Rainbow

Winner of the Crystal Bear (youth audience award) at the Berlin Film Festival and Hong Kong’s official entry for this year’s Oscars®, Echoes of the Rainbow is a graceful and emotionally powerful tale based on the filmmaker’s real-life childhood. It’s the spring of 1969 and the world will have to wait another six months before Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon — but our young hero “Big Ears” is running through the streets of Hong Kong with a goldfish bowl on his head, Big brother Desmond (played wonderfully by Cantopop heartthrob, Aarif Lee) is a gold-medal track star and ace student who plays guitar and nurtures a nascent romance with soft-spoken cutie pie Flora. Meanwhile, their parents work their fingers to the bone running a tiny neighborhood shoe store. Their dream is simple: all they want is for their children to have a better life than they did — and this mood of nostalgic optimism and yearning is reflected perfectly by the sappy 60’s pop ballads wafting from big brother’s transistor radio. But the sunny tone soon darkens as the family is beset by a slumping economy, social unrest, and the onset of Hong Kong’s annual typhoons — presaging an even more wrenching family tragedy. This wonderful, bittersweet saga is almost epic in scale, evoking good times and bad times, love and loss, with sincerity, humor, and tenderness.