Sag Harbor Cinema and Hamptons Doc Fest Present ‘Mistress Dispeller’

Sag Harbor Cinema will host a special screening of Elizabeth Lo’s 2024 documentary “Mistress Dispeller” in collaboration with Hamptons Doc Fest on Sunday, December 8, at 4:30 p.m.

Lo’s award-winning debut feature “Stray,” which followed three dogs as they navigate life on the streets of Istanbul, was part of the cinema’s virtual program in 2020. This year, Lo returns to the cinema with her new documentary “Mistress Dispeller,” which held its world premiere at Venice Film Festival in September. The Hong Kong born filmmaker will join the cinema’s artistic director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan via Zoom, for a live post screening Q&A.

“Mistress Dispeller” follows a new line of work in China’s love industry. A mistress dispeller, often hired by a wife for tens of thousands of dollars, is an undercover professional who is hired to help repair marriages by breaking up extramarital affairs. By befriending the mistress under a false identity over the course of two or three months, the dispeller works to influence the mistress to end the affair on her own.

“I came of age watching movies like ‘A Room with A View,’ ‘Notting Hill,’ ‘Bend it Like Beckham,’ ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘Lost in Translation’ on repeat,” says Lo. “Like many around the world, these idealized visions of romance shaped mine. Yet my experience of love within my own family was markedly different from what I saw represented in these movies. In my home, love was bound up with sacrifice, duty and what’s left unsaid. As a director, I wanted to see this specific kind of love through my own camera, and use a crisis of infidelity as my entryway to discover how emotion is expressed and experienced in my culture.”

Lo, a Hong Kong citizen, felt it was important to make a film that bridged the divide between cultures, particularly in an era of increasing polarization between the U.S. and China. By investigating an experience that is at once universal and also uniquely specific to contemporary China, Lo created a documentary that speaks broadly to the human experiences with love, loneliness, and heartbreak in the 21st century.

“In its smart, elegant balance between the utterly foreign and the very familiar, ‘Mistress Dispeller’ is a film as insightful as it is fresh and funny,” said Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. “Never condescending to its characters and yet illuminating their contradictions and paradoxes. I am very happy that our annual collaboration with Hamptons Doc Fest is represented by such innovative and thought provoking work.”

Purchase tickets for the screening at hamptonsdocfest.com. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street in Sag Harbor.