Hong Kong-born filmmaker Elizabeth Lo on her award-winning documentary ‘Mistress Dispeller’ and why patience always pays off

Lo made Mistress Dispeller over three years, which encompassed the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and necessitated multiple three-week quarantines both entering mainland China and re-entering Hong Kong. She documented an unfolding family drama from all corners of a love triangle—the cheating husband, the mistress and the wife who hired Teacher Wang, a professional “mistress dispeller”, to save her marriage. “Access was a constant negotiation,” Lo says. “Every day we filmed with our subjects, we assumed it was our last.” Yet she persisted. “The material we were getting was always extraordinary. Even though it was really hard and uncertain, when I was filming it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, when people see this, it’ll be a treat for them as much as it was for me.’”

The film’s power lies in its empathy. Lo traces this back to a single afternoon during the initial scouting shoot with Teacher Wang, when she filmed a cheating husband weeping at the table. “He felt that he couldn’t relate to his wife, who came from a better socioeconomic background than him. He felt much more of a kindred spirit with his mistress, who came from a similarly impoverished background,” she recalls. “I felt so much sympathy for him in the ways that class affects our love lives, and he’s just struggling because he’s caught within these systems.” That unexpected empathy became the film’s guiding principle. “I wanted whatever story I told to elicit that kind of response.”

The ethical dimensions of the project were considerable too. Lo and her producers travelled back to China after completing an initial cut to show the participants in the film, giving them the opportunity to withdraw consent. “No film is worth jeopardising the promises that you’ve made,” she says. The couple remained in the film and, Lo says, are still married today.

The filmmaker’s approach to storytelling springs from her conviction that “the further away you are from the centres of power, the more accurate the view of the world.” In both Mistress Dispeller and her 2020 debut feature Stray, for which she followed stray dogs through Istanbul, she seeks out perspectives that the mainstream overlooks.

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Lo admits to being a different person behind the camera than at other times. Though she confesses she’s “not necessarily that patient a person” in her personal life. “Once I  have a camera in hand, I’m just so grateful and happy that I’m capturing images and recording spontaneous moments that I didn’t expect to encounter through the lens,” she says. “Time passes differently when I’m making films.”

Her dedication is already paying dividends beyond Mistress Dispeller’s impressive awards circuit run. Lo’s sales agent informed her that sales of Stray have increased by 1,000 per cent following the success of her second feature. “That’s part of being an independent filmmaker—that patience and the view towards the long road,” she says. “People may not immediately see your film, but slowly, if you keep persisting, hopefully you’ll find an audience that resonates with it too.” 

Now, after several years of non-fictional work, Lo is ready for a new challenge and is in the early stages of adapting a short story into her first narrative feature. “Having spent many years making observational documentaries, I want to try to flex a new muscle in which I’m exerting more control over the vision of the stories that I can tell,” she says.

As for advice to emerging filmmakers, Lo returns to a piece of wisdom someone once shared with her: “Your first film will always be your first, and nothing will ever feel the way it did when you first embarked naively on a project. I was naive when I set out to make a film about the world as seen through the eyes of stray dogs, and I really cherish the naivety that I had when I embarked on that. Even if it’s hard and even if it seems like nobody is supporting you or interested in what you’re doing, that experience itself, in trying to bring a vision into the world, is a really beautiful one.”

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