productiondrama
Louise Wong
Slave trade When Asian movie veteran Meileen Choo three decades, her retirement project became Coolie. Janine Stein spoke to her on the eve of
In the heart of Havana, Cuba honours the Chinese men who fought in the independence struggle from Spanish colonial rule in the late 1800s. “There wasn’t one Cuban-Chinese deserter. There wasn’t one Cuban-Chinese traitor” – these words are etched in bronze beneath the black granite column. The origins of the Chinese presence in Cuba is longer, harder and harsher than the monument may suggest, rooted in the misery of a colonial slave trade that brought waves of indentured servants – “coolies” – from China to work on Spanish sugar and tobacco plantations. This is the backdrop to the US$20-million Coolie, an eight-episode limited drama series directed by Taiwanese-American filmmaker, Arvin Chen (Pachinko), which starts shooting in the Dominican Republic and Panama in the first week of December. The first project from film-industry veteran Meileen Choo’s three-year-old Cathay Film Company in Singapore, Coolie stars a multinational cast from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Cuba and Colombia in a story set in the 1860s about an illiterate young Chinese village girl, Chulin, played by Hong Kong actress/model Louise Wong (Anita). Chulin sets off from southern China to marry a rebel son, played by Taiwanese actor Joseph Chang, who is working on a sugarcane plantation in Cuba. Disguised as a man to evade the Qing militia, the canny Chulin lands in Havana clutching only her grandmother’s traditional Chinese medicine box. “That’s all she carried with her,” Choo says, adding: “All the coolies came with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.” Colombian star Mauricio Henao (Fake Profile) plays the sympathetic, 48
contentasia december 2023