The Miserable Girl (1975)

Overview

Haunted by her past, an ailing young woman who recently lost her mother and the roof over her head is reluctant to accept the generosity of an older man who fell out with his own daughter whose affair with his boss's son cost him his job; her reasons are revealed only after her death and when the past is dredged up. Based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted, the film was filmed and distributed in Taiwan however was not released in Hong Kong. It is Ho Fan’s first attempt to fulfil his vision for an art house production in mainstream cinema which breaks the mould by mixing the nuance of art films with popular culture in a confrontation between the old and the new. It was selected in the 1980s by Hsu Li-Kong, director of then Film Library of the Motion Picture Development Foundation (now Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute), as part of its permanent collection. (By Reel to Reel Institute)