I Blew Out The Candles Before Making A Wish follows Jojo, a young girl in Macau with a sick grandmother and an absentee father, who has disappeared due to debt. After discovering a bag full of dead chips–which can only be used for gambling but cannot be cashed out directly–Jojo begins pushing various adults in her life to gamble in Macau’s casinos, in the hopes of solving her family’s financial issues.
First, Jojo enlists her homeroom teacher, who helps Jojo several times but later sells the chips to a buyer and claims to have lost the winnings. Next, Jojo turns to Hua, a soft-hearted debt collector from Taiwan who has been sent to collect from Jojo and her mother. Hua, played by Taiwanese actor Kai Ko, is a divorcee who seeks to reconnect with his ex-wife. He proves not only unable to collect the debt from Jojo, but increasingly drawn into her casino schemes, proving too compassionate to simply abandon Jojo to her own devices.
I Blew Out The Candles Before Making A Wish is one of the many Sinophone films in recent years about soft-hearted debt collectors. Another notable example from past years is the 2021 Taiwanese film Man in Love. Likewise, one notes that the specter of Macau’s gambling industry tends to loom large in the territory’s cinema, with a strong focus on migrants struggling to eke out a living between the high-rises and casinos.
To a large extent, the movie is carried by Mui Cheng-in’s role as Jojo. Nevertheless, both Jojo and other characters, such as Hua, are mostly one-note—the characters do not appear to have changed much by the end of I Blew Out the Candles Before Making A Wish.
Furthermore, the movie fails to make any truly cutting social commentary on Macau, and simply accepts casinos as a natural part of its characters’ lives—perhaps due to political considerations. Any critiques about socioeconomic inequality, or even messaging about how outsiders like Jojo and Hua needing to band together against oppressive circumstances, are completely absent from the film.
Even so, I Blew Out The Candles Before Making A Wish works well enough from a cinematographic perspective, with beautiful long shots showing Macau’s urban environments and deftly realized interior settings. If the movie’s plot leaves you somewhat wanting, Kai Ko’s Hua and Mui Cheng-in’s Jojo are at least charming enough to provide an enjoyable watch.
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I Blew Out The Candles Before Making A Wish (Chinese: 我未許願先吹蠟燭) — Taiwan. Dialog in Cantonese and Mandarin. Directed by Chao Koi-wang and Hu Chin-ye. Running time 1hr 56min. First released June 27, 2026. Starring Kai Ko, Mui Cheng-in, Elaine Jin, Tou Chung-hua, Stanley Yau, Dada Chen.
This article is part of Cinema Escapist‘s dedicated coverage of the 2026 New York Asian Film Festival. I Blew Out The Candles Before Making A Wish screens July 22 at SVA Theatre with a Q&A featuring director Chao Koi-wang, actor Kai Ko, and producer David Tang.