Motherhood (1960)

The sins of the patriarch filter down to the next generation in Tso’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, Ghosts. Eighteen years after he was sent overseas by his suffering mother (Wong), the son (Cheung) of an affluent household returns as a shadow of himself – both physically and spiritually – before unwittingly falling for his philandering father’s illegitimate daughter (Ha), conceived through the rape of a housemaid. No doubt ironically titled, Motherhood presents a restrained subversion of the Cantonese family melodrama tradition.