When Clara Law’s film Floating Life opened in Australian cinemas in 1996, the Hong Kong-raised, Melbourne-based writer-director did not expect it to pack such a strong cultural punch.

Along with being one of few local films to deal with the Asian migrant experience, Floating Life made history as Australia’s first-ever submission in the best foreign language film category at the Academy Awards, and ignited a new generation of Asian Australian film-makers.

“I love hearing people talk about my film and saying, ‘I’m still thinking of the film’,” Law says. “That’s what we [with her husband and constant collaborator, co-writer, Eddie Fong] want to do: make films that can stand the passage of time and can touch people’s hearts hundreds of years later.”

This year, Floating Life received a long-awaited digital restoration by the National Film and Sound Archive and will be presented on the big screen at the 2021 Sydney film festival alongside Law’s latest feature film, Drifting Petals, a free-wandering elegy to the loss of her brother and the fading memories of her two home cities of Macau and Hong Kong.

Law describes Floating Life’s tonal inflections as “leaning towards the farcical”. The story follows the Chan family’s relocation from the bustling, steamy streets of Hong Kong to the sunburnt, open-concrete suburbia of Sydney.

Tinged with tragicomedy, the film is also laced with heightened emotions, as the family face the jarring cultural shocks associated with immigration – from the pressures of assimilation and intergenerational tensions down to the sharp physical contrast of the blinding Australian skies. In an amusingly staged scene, the Chans wear sunglasses inside their sparse, white home after being warned of the hole in the ozone layer.

“That’s what I felt too when I first came to Australia,” Law says. “It was all very strange to me but also very seductive – I wanted to recreate the feeling of this space, light and colour. With this distinctiveness, you feel the family spread all over, and not together. So, how and where can they find their home?”

Speaking from her home in Melbourne where she has been based since the 1990s (she was born in Macau and raised in Hong Kong), Law’s film-making career and more generally, life journey, has been shaped by a search for home.

In the early 1990s, she won awards across European and Asian film festivals for her independent Hong Kong arthouse features, notably Autumn Moon and Temptation of a Monk, the latter of which played in competition at the 1993 Venice film festival.

She then made three Australian films, including Floating Life and the 2000 Rose Byrne-led road movie The Goddess of 1967. Law has spent the past decade or so exploring new terrain within the Chinese film industry, making Like a Dream in Taiwan and The Unbearable Lightness of Inspector Fan in Shanghai.

“My whole life has been travelling the world,” she says. “It became natural to continue to make films [in Australia] when I thought there was more of a chance to make art films, compared to compromising in Hong Kong when we had to deal with more private funding. But with the change of government [in Australia], our funding was shrinking and then nonexistent.”

Being uncompromisingly “original and fresh” is at the heart of Law’s film-making ethos – in style and content. During our conversation, she constantly refers to her favourite film-makers, Yasujirō Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky.

“It’s how I was brought up,” she says. “Their touch on your soul is so strong and so true, and I just want to hold on to that [feeling] for as many days as possible.”

Law’s latest film, Drifting Petals, is a continuation of her belief that “film is an art first and foremost”. An experimental self-funded “alternate cinema” piece made over five years, Drifting Petals is inspired by WG Sebald’s novels in its blending of travelogue, historical fact, fiction and memoir – and loosely follows a film-maker as she reconnects with a piano student in Hong Kong. A drifting camera follows them each separately as they confront long-lost memories, meeting those living and dead, and facing an uncertain future.

The free-spirited vision behind the project meant Law and Fong had no choice but to take a “DIY-nano production” approach. It saw the pair fulfilling most creative and practical elements themselves – sometimes resorting to YouTube tutorials to fill in the blanks.

Despite its challenges, Law compares film-making to an addiction – “a fire in the belly”. “I can’t do things I don’t like. It is to my disadvantage that I am like that,” she laughs. “It is a hard thing to make films, but it consumes you. If I didn’t think it was worth doing, then why am I doing it?”

It’s perhaps why Law thinks her and Fong’s films are “a bit ahead of [their] time”: Floating Life initially opened as a small national release to modest reception.

“It’s OK,” she says, almost forgivingly. “Floating Life has helped spur [Asian-Australians] into their film-making careers, like [director] Corrie Chen, and I am glad to hear that has happened. It is like a relay, there is no ego there.”

For her next project, The Little QiPao Shop, Law has also turned her lens on her adopted home. She describes it as a film for the “new generation” – an intergenerational story centring on a 28-year-old Australian-born Chinese woman growing up between two cultures.

“I think there are still some [Asian Australian] stories in the pipeline for me,” Law says. “But maybe I’ll find something in Taiwan, in the UK, maybe here. There are always stories, and there are always interesting people.”

• Drifting Petals and Floating Life are showing at the Sydney film festival 2021, which runs 3–21 November