“But I met a lot of people, and through these encounters, I have accumulated enough footage that could be edited into a film.” I came just to shoot some footage,” he said, while admitting his curiosity about British culture, which previously had great cultural influence over Hong Kong. “I wasn’t planning to make a film in London. The process inspired him to take on a new challenge. Through this project, Yip interviewed 100 young people and got in touch with the East London scene. It emerged following “Cloud,” an artistic project that Yip worked on for London’s Southbank Centre in 2018.
Unlike the many meticulously planned blockbuster film projects that the 54-year-old has worked on, from Ang Lee’s 2000 martial arts epic “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” for which he won an Academy Award for best art direction and a BAFTA Award for best costume design, to John Woo’s “Red Cliff” (2007), and most recently, the yet-to-release Chinese fantasy epic “Fengshen Trilogy,” “Love Infinity” happened rather spontaneously. The film also features Yip’s enigmatic creation Lili, an imaginary character from a world of the future that appears in the form of a mannequin or sometimes as a sculpture. “When The Sun Goes Quiet,” on the other hand, is semi-fictional. The nearly three-and-a-half hour long “Memorandum for The Next Golden Age” is a semi-documentary, in which Yip revisits the history of East London through interviews with some of the key players of the local scene, from fashion designer Vivienne Westwood to artistic duo Gilbert & George, Philip and Charlotte Colbert, artist and campaigner Daniel Lismore, sculptor Andrew Logan, and Jonny Woo, a comedian and drag queen. Shot over the span of two years, the two films are set against the backdrop of the unique cultural scene of East London. Tim Yip Studio handles international sales.
Produced by art patron and photographer Maryam Eisler, and Mei-Hui Liu, a designer and curator, the first two films of the project, “Love Infinity: When the Sun Goes Quiet,” and “Love Infinity: Memorandum for The Next Golden Age,” will be premiered on art house streaming platform Mubi on March 24, 2022.