Six years after producing A Chinese Ghost Story, Tsui Hark inverted a legend and directed one of the most sensual and visually drunk fantasies Hong Kong ever made - with that film's unforgettable ghost, Joey Wong, now playing a snake.

One of the four great folktales of China tells of a snake spirit who takes the form of a woman and falls in love with a mortal man. In nearly every version, a righteous monk arrives to tear them apart and restore the natural order, and the monk is the hero.

GREEN SNAKE (1993) tells the story from the side of the demons and finds them more human than the holy man hunting them. It even shifts the focus onto its forgotten character.

The green snake of the title is usually a minor maid, but here she is the center, the younger and wilder of two snake sisters, played by Maggie Cheung years before she became one of the great faces of world cinema. Wong plays her sister, the white snake, who falls for a mortal scholar and tries to live as a human woman.

The monk, Fahai, cannot accept that demons might love more purely than men. In the climax, as floodwaters rise around the battle, his robe swells until it blots out the sun, and the water turns onto the villages and the temple he swore to protect, drowning the innocents he claimed to be saving.

The snakes are left to wonder why humans, who understand love so poorly, are so certain they own it.

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Green Snake (1993) was written, produced, and directed by Tsui Hark, co-produced with Ng See-Yuen, and developed under their production banners Film Workshop and Seasonal Film Corporation. It was primarily distributed theatrically in Hong Kong by Gala Film Distribution on November 4, 1993, before rolling out to international markets such as South Korea, Australia, and the UK.