In search of a silver lining

Set principally in picturesque New Zealand, the 132-minute film follows the story of a Chinese expatriate who travels over 15,000 kilometers to fulfill his late wife's wishes, returning some of her ashes to her hometown in China and scattering more into the sea at a whale-watching spot near in New Zealand.

Through a series of flashbacks, the story unfolds how the couple fell in love when they rented separate rooms in a Chinese woman's house in Auckland, and later, their painstaking efforts in setting up their Chinese restaurant in the small town of Clyde in southern New Zealand.

Huang, 34, stars as the grieving husband, while 27-year-old actress Yang Caiyu plays his wife. The new movie marks their reunion after appearing as the main characters in Youth.

Yang, whose father died of cancer two years ago, recalls that she could appreciate the sentimental tone of the movie from her own parents' love story.

"My mother's situation is much like the husband's in the film. They have both been left in the sorrow of loneliness halfway along life's path," Yang explains.

Both of the stars spent a long time preparing for their roles in order to convey the bittersweet romance and the characters' sense of isolation and loneliness as expatriates.