Historic Lodgings

Mr. Kam, a San Va Hostel employee for 30 years, recalls the day  Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai and his team set up to film 2046, a story about lonely characters and unrequited love, set in the future and a hotel room, which was shot in around 2004. 

 

“Wong Kar-Wai never takes off his sunglasses,” says Mr. Kam, now in his sixties, laughing and gesturing to his eyewear, adding that the director has been a regular visitor to the establishment. Wong Kar-Wai filmed parts of In The Mood for Love in Macau, as well as the sequel, 2046. 

 

“What interests me is not the relationship between gambling and the triads, but what remains of the colonial past of Macau,” said the director on one of the occasions he visited the city.

 

The setting of countless cinematographic productions and performances, the most recent cultural event to be held at San Va Hostel was a play entitled Valley of the Dolls staged in November by the group D’As Entranhas Macau, an extension of the Portuguese collective created in 1999, by actress Vera Paz. The play, narrated “with humour and irony”, tells the story of four women, in their 40s, in their daily intimacies, in a building in the suburb of the city, the actress explains in a press release.

 

“Opening the venue to cultural events is our intention. Reaching out to society to promote, help develop and popularize traditional culture is also our goal,” says Anna Yip, who runs San Va Hostel, a family business owned by her mother, Irene Yip. 

 

“We welcome all kinds of cultural events, filmmaking, live performances, exhibitions, book readings, movie appreciation nights – you name it. Our aim is to revitalize this distinct heritage building, and gradually transform it into a residence-museum, to infuse it with vitality, youth and a cultural atmosphere. I believe that, in turn, the building itself will absorb the positive energy and last a long time with the spirits,” Anna shares of her vision.

 

San Va Hostel has participated in various cultural activities, says the establishment’s director, adding that they were co-organizers of the Macao City Fringe Festival 2014, and have participated in seminars on conservation and enhancement of historical heritage, as well as “revitalizing old areas by infusing new cultural elements” events, in addition to participating in the Macau Heritage Ambassadors Association (MHAA) programmes. 

 

During the Macao City Fringe Festival 2014, San Va was the stage for a dance performance. 

 

“The audience was standing on the street, facing the guesthouse. Dancers were dancing on the three balconies on the second floor,” San Va’s director recalls. On another occasion, the dancers used the facade of San Va as a backdrop. 

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, Anna Yip recalls, “there were regular movie nights held inside the guesthouse. A projector was placed inside the guesthouse to project the movies on the wall. I learned this from my dad and long term residents of the area,” she says.

 

 

 

“San Va Hostel is a place where we can easily confuse memories with fictions that have been framed, through the eyes of different filmmakers, who have passed through that space,” says Vanessa Pimentel, director of the documentary San Va Hotel – Behind the Scenes, co-authored with Yves Etienne Sonolet. It was that “mix between fiction and reality” that compelled her to make the documentary, which covers the history of the guesthouse, open for over 80 years, framed behind the scenes of the filming of Ivo M. Ferreira’s latest production, Empire Hotel.

 

San Va Hostel, located at number 67 Rua da Felicidade, has the peculiarity of maintaining not only its façade, but also in the interior configuration from when it was transformed into a guesthouse, circa 1930, having previously been a private club. The “vintage” atmosphere of the building, built around 1870 in the Chinese architecture of the time, with about three dozen rooms, separated by wooden walls, corners accessed through narrow and dimly lit corridors, has caught the eye of several filmmakers over the years.

 

Pang Ho-Cheung, also from Hong Kong, filmed Isabella here, in around 2004. The film’s poster hung in the guesthouse entrance for a time, featuring the protagonist, Isabella Nolasco da Silva Leong from Macau, climbing a long narrow staircase, now lined green, which led to the reception. 

 

San Va is also the setting for Butterfly, shot at the same time, by director Yan Yan Mak, starring Josie Ho, daughter of gaming mogul Stanley Ho. The film focuses on the love affair between Flavia, played by Josie Ho, a married high school teacher who meets singer-songwriter Yip, played by Tian Yuan. The film was screened in Macau in 2014 during the Macau Literary Festival – The Script Road, with the presence of Tian Yuan.

 

 

 

At the top of the staircase Mr. Kam can be found, manning the guest ‘check-in’ and ‘check-out’ duties. Calendar pages blow in the gust of the ceiling fans above his head. Next to the flags of Macau and China, is an altar lit and decorated in red; an orange is the offering of the day for the protective figure of Guan Yu. The warrior general of Chinese antiquity is a paradigm of loyalty and justice, worshiped in mainland China, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau and among overseas communities, a deity of religious devotion and ubiquitous in traditional Chinese shops and establishments.

 

Kam says many people who come to San Va are attracted by the fact that it is “a famous place because many movies have been made here and many stars have been here, a lot of people want to stay here because of that,” he says, running his hand over the counter. Kam, who also cleans and cares for the space, along with his colleague Stanley, with whom he shares the shifts, stresses, however, that the guesthouse mainly attracts clientele because it is “cheap, clean, safe and quiet”.

 

Between and during any filming projects, the hostel still keeps its doors open to guests. The interior of the building has just benefited from a number of renovations, with newly painted walls and new plumbing. Some of the old tiled floors have been replaced with plastic material that mimics the flooring, interventions needed to maintain the building and make the space pleasant for guests, explains Anna Yip. She adds that the rooms are kept quite simple, without air conditioning or private bathrooms, due to the building’s age and restrictions on the works that can be done – a reason behind keeping prices relatively cheap by Macau standards.

 

Checking out today is a diamond dealer, Liu Wei, from Guangzhou. Pleased at being a target of interest, he tells us he is an employee of the jewelery company Luk Fook. This is the second time he has stayed at San Va, a place he found by chance, when looking for cheap accommodation in the centre of town. The diamond expert explains that Macau is a point of travel between the mainland where jewelry processing and production is located, Hong Kong, the company’s headquarters, and South Africa, Belgium or Angola, where the customers are.

 

The conversation is only midway through, when Mexican Fernando Gutierrez leaves a room, in a corner of the reception area. He is travelling through Asia with Dutch friend Anita Tang, who is of Chinese origin. They found the guesthouse on the Internet. 

 

“We arrived yesterday, very late. It is very difficult to find a cheap place, and this guesthouse is mentioned many times. This is the most affordable one in the area, so we stayed here. It is a convenient place, clean, central, not that expensive,” Anita Tang explains. From here, the travellers will head to Malaysia.

 

The following Saturday, when we return to the guesthouse, the owner, Mrs. Irene Yip, in her seventies, is leaning against the counter, in a lively exchange of what appears to be a fun conversation in Cantonese with “Aunty Sam”, who has retired, after almost 30 years of service. 

 

“She still comes back now and again to help, especially in the spirit of good business for our guesthouse and the good health and safety of our employees,” Anna Yip shares.

 

 

 

In 2017, it was the turn of Portuguese director Ivo M. Ferreira to take up residence in the hostel for several weeks to shoot Empire Hotel, which had its world premiere on October 12 this year at the second edition of the Pingyao International Film Festival, created last year by Chinese director Jia Zhangke and programmer Marco Müller. 

 

The filming of Empire Hotel was the largest production in terms of scale to take place in the guesthouse, Anna Yip recounts. 

 

“We had never rented the entire guesthouse for filming, we usually rent a few rooms only. It was the first time we stopped receiving new guests during the filming period.  Before, we continued to welcome anyone who came in or had made online reservations,” the manager of the space explains.

 

The film, starring Portuguese actress Margarida Vila-Nova and the British-Taiwanese actor Rhydian Vaughan, has a recurring theme in the life of the city – the accelerated change of pace, driven by real estate speculation and economic growth.

 

In the movie, filmed entirely in Macau, the protagonist and the father strive to keep the business running and prevent the building from being demolished and replaced by a skyscraper, a plot that could almost be mistaken for real life. 

 

But  this is not the case, since Rua da Felicidade, including the land plots on which San Va sits, numbers 65 and 67, is part of the list of classified real estate, also called heritage buildings, although it is not part of the “Historic Center of Macau”, classified as a World Heritage by UNESCO. 

 

Ivo M. Ferreira has actually filmed in the hostel on a number of occasions since 1999, returning once again in 2017. San Va is also in the director’s memories from when he arrived in Macau in the 1990s. At that time, he stayed in another hotel in the neighborhood, Tong Fong, on Travessa da Felicidade. 

 

In those days, “it was all very mysterious, it was like a dark street where we didn’t know what was happening, all those doors and corridors.  SanVa is also a strange place, you do not know what is behind those doors,” says the director in the documentary by Vanessa Pimentel and Yves Etienne Sonolet. 

 

Ferreira adds: “I like the buzz, the energy of the city that is always changing, but I also like places that do not change. I like it when I find places that I have known for a long time and that stay the same”.