Song of the Exile (1990)

Ann Hui's semi-autobiographical drama about a daughter, played by Maggie Cheung, who comes home from studying in London in the 1970s and clashes with her Japanese mother. Then the film reaches back into the mother's own past in wartime Manchukuo and follows the two of them to her birthplace in Japan, and the outsider who never quite belonged in a Chinese household comes into focus. Few Hong Kong films are this precise about being caught between places, and the theme of where home really is hits harder knowing the decade that followed. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1990; come for Cheung, stay for Lu Hsiao-fen as the mother.