Sketching the contours of a cinema of care: Hong Kong’s Ann Hui as a paradigmatic figure

Current interest in care and caring is linked to the emergence of catastrophic risks arising from humanity’s acquisition, in the course of the last century, of the ability to destroy itself. The claim is that care and caring now function as hypergoods or moral sources, as frameworks enabling us to orient ourselves in moral space, to define our identities, and to evaluate the relative worth of different courses of action. In this sense ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are virtue terms of the twenty first century. A distinction is made between higher order category traits defining a cinema of care and concrete instantiations of such traits. In the specification of the higher order category traits one feature—the avoidance of harm—is foregrounded as a necessary condition. With an eye to pinpointing what a cinema of care localised in Hong Kong might look like, Ann Hui’s contribution to Hong Kong cinema and, more specifically, her 2011 film, A Simple Life, are explored in detail.