Category: Hong Kong

In Broad Daylight (白日之下, Lawrence Kan, 2023)

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A jaded investigative reporter rediscovers a sense of purpose even as her industry flounders while exposing systematised abuse and neglect in privately run care homes in Lawrence Kan’s hard-hitting drama, In Broad Daylight (白日之下). The film’s title hints at its pervasive sense of despair, the problem isn’t so much that no one knew the state of affairs but that no one cared enough to do anything about it while the journalists too find themselves at the mercy of a hyper-capitalistic society. 

A whistleblower close to the end of the film reveals that they’d been anonymously sending photos from the care home where they work because they wanted “to feel human again” and “treat others as humans” only until now no one had taken any notice. They weren’t really expecting that anyone ever would. Top investigative reporter Kay (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying) is one of only a handful of reporters left on her paper which is threatening to shut down the investigative department altogether if they can’t bring in a big scoop. Kay’s boss is similarly conflicted, not wanting to crush the idealism of rookie recruit Jess in insisting that their work has value in telling the stories that should be told while privately reminding Kay that the care home scandal might not be “explosive” enough to earn them a reprieve from their boss. 

For her own part, Kay is already jaded explaining to Jess that nothing really matters and nothing they write makes any difference when wrongdoers generally get off scot-free. Her desire to pursue the care home story is partly personal in that she’s dealing with a degree of guilt and grief over the death of her grandfather who took his own life in a privately run facility. To investigate one she’s been tipped off is particuarly bad, she poses as the granddaughter of a patient with dementia, Kin-tong, explaining that she’s not visited before because her family moved to Canada when she was a child, and thereafter making an offer to volunteer on seeing how bad things really are there witnessing not only a dead rat in Kin-tong’s room but physical abuse of the residents. 

It would be easy enough to assume that the faults are “isolated incidents” as the regulatory body likes to describe them and mostly down to the presence of the head nurse, Mrs Fong, who is clearly not someone who should be working in a care facillity, but the truth is that these are systemic problems largely born of governmental indifference. A government source tells her that the waiting list for a publicly funded homes stands at 15 years leaving many families little choice but to take what they can afford in the private sector. They are often unable to take care of elderly relatives themselves because they cannot take time off work to do so, or are simply not equipped to respond to their loved ones’ needs. 

But neither are the care homes. The manager, Chief Cheung who is blind himself, in part justifies the existence of his facility on the grounds that it is difficiult for people with disabilities to find homes to take them, painting the community as a happy family home doing its best rather than a callous attempt to exploit the vulnerable run by a dodgy businessman who admits that even if they’re exposed they’ll just change their name and start again somewhere else. Kay asks Kin-tong why he stays but he tells her that they’re all the same anyway. Even when she uncovers evidence of sexual abuse of a resident with learning difficulties she discovers that it’s almost impossible to prosecute because no one wants to put a vulnerable person on the stand opposite their abuser which allows them the confidence to think they can do whatever they want because they’ll never face dismissal let alone criminal proceedings. 

Kay begins to wonder what the point is if, as people are fond of telling her, no one really cares, but also is also forced to reflect on the moral difficulties of the situation. If the home is closed down, it will leave many of the residents with nowhere else to go. Mostly likely they will end up on the streets or in another equally bad private care home while she at least might earn herself a temporary reprieve in achieving the kind of scoop her money-minded editor was looking for. Her boss insists that she can’t change the world, the system won’t change overnight even if people are temporarily outraged. The truth is that these are people who’ve been abandoned by their society and often by their families especially with so many younger people emigrating leaving relatives behind with no one to watch over them. Though somewhat jaded, Kay comes to empathise with the people she meets at the care home and rediscovers a sense of purpose in her work that reminds her it’s worth the fight even if in the end nothing really changes. In many ways bleak, Kan’s empathetic drama is otherwise undespairing in its gentle advocation for mutual compassion and world in which we can truly take care of each other.

In Broad Daylight screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It will also be screening in Chicago on Sept. 16 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Back Home (七月返歸, Nate Tse Ka-ki, 2023)

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“This place is cursed” according to an exasperated policeman dealing with yet another suicide at a rundown public housing estate in Hong Kong in Nate Tse Ka-Ki’s gripping supernatural thriller, Back Home (七月返歸). It’s true enough that this seems to be a fairly haunted land in which it has become quite difficult to tell the living from the dead, “they seem so real, I can’t tell the difference” a little boy admits while unfairly burdened by the ability to see things that others don’t or at least have become adept in not seeing. 

Wing (Anson Kong Ip-sang) too once had the ability to see ghosts, but apparently grew out of it after moving to Canada to live with his uncle a decade previously. All this place holds for him now is horror, he admits on being called home following his estranged mother’s attempt to take her own life. Now stable but in a coma, a doctor suggests it’s like her soul has gone wandering and they’ll have to wait to see if it ever comes back. Staying in his childhood home, Wing finds himself assaulted by painful memories of the past along with more literal ghosts he can’t really be sure aren’t manifestations of his trauma or symptoms of a fracturing mind. 

Then again, there is something very weird about this particular block. The people who remember Wing remember him as “spooky”, a boy who was rejected by the community around him after claiming to see ghosts. His embarrassed mother regularly railed at him, accusing him of lying and blaming him for his father leaving the family while seemingly suffering from mental health issues that have also seen her reduced to a figure of fun by the local kids. She tries all sorts of Taoist rituals including having him beaten with a burning stick to close his third eye all which understandably results in Wing deciding to remain silent and speak no more of ghosts while otherwise unseeing them in effort that must place extreme strain his own mental health. His plight is essentially one of repression in which he is haunted in more ways than one while forced to deny his authentic self because of a social taboo.

Even so, it’s a taboo others would quite like to break. In some ways we can’t quite tell if it isn’t Wing who’s dead and haunting his childhood home or if everyone else is actually a ghost. The ominous Uncle Chung who sells paper sacrifices hints as much when he unironically offers to make some for Wing while his overly cheerful wife’s constant offers of her special soup seem as if they may have some kind of ulterior motive. Complaining that there’s definitely something rotten in this apartment block, Wing discovers that there have been other victims besides his mother and hears from a little boy, Yu, that anyone who visits the forbidden seventh floor meets a sticky end. What’s waiting for Wing up there is a Lynchian world of repressed memory eager to confront him with his traumatic past and either set him free or trap him there forever. 

Bonding with Yu who is after all much like himself, a lonely little boy rejected by his peers while constantly “bothered” by wandering spirits, Wing starts to suspect there’s something more sinister going on. Director Nate Tse Ka-ki drops in repeated visual clues such as the distinctive pairs of scissors that seem to turn up in odd places while otherwise blurring the lines between the world of the living and the dead and alluding to other kinds of exile such as Wing’s life in Canada and estrangement from his family. On his return “back home”, he feels conflicted and resentful almost as if his mother had called him back and was refusing to let him go while grandma Chung ominously offers to look after Wing’s offspring when he eventually has one now that he’s where he’s supposed to be she assumes for good. It’s difficult not to read something sinister in her speeches about engineering a better future to “bring peace to this place” even before it becomes clear that it isn’t so much the lifting of a curse she’s interested in as its fulfilment. Some viewers may also detect something familiar in her delivery. In any case, in embracing a younger version of himself Wing may finally be able to escape his haunting even if it leaves him with a difficult choice between comforting fantasy and an objectively horrific “reality”.

Back Home screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: ©️mm2 Studios Hong Kong

Mad Fate (命案, Soi Cheang, 2023)

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“No one can stray from the path paved by fate.” a policewoman gasps while interrogating The Master (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung), a man whose mind was already strained even before he walked in on the murder of a woman he’d been trying to save only to end up losing to destiny. A noticeably lighter affair than his previous film Limbo, Mad Fate (命案) sees Soi Cheang (AKA Cheang Pou-soi) step into the Milky Way orbit directing a screenplay by Yau Nai-hoi produced by Johnnie To and very much bound up with the kinds of cosmic coincidences the studio is known for.

It’s Fate or maybe God that The Master is resisting, though what the difference between the two might be is never quite clear save for the implication that it’s God who is master of Fate which is otherwise without will. The Master insists that “Fate can be changed,” but he resolutely fails to do so. In the opening sequence, he’s in the middle of burying a woman, May, alive as part of a ritual to stave off a forthcoming “calamity” only he’s unable to complete it in part because of the woman’s understandable anxiety that it’s The Master who’s going to end up killing her, and in part because it starts raining which puts out the paper clothing that should have been burnt to change her fate. May runs off and climbs in a taxi home where she is accosted by a serial killer who has been targeting sex workers. The Master follows her but arrives just too late while the police later chase the killer but are unable to catch him. 

The Master sees his attempts frustrated but also does not consider that the rain itself was a manifestation of Fate or sign that in the end nothing can be changed. In an effort to atone for his inability to save May, The Master ends up taking under his wing a strange young man who also stumbled on the murder by coincidence while working as a delivery driver but is fascinated rather than repulsed by the bloody scene. Obsessed with knives and killing, Siu-tung (Lokman Yeung) is already known to the policeman investigating (Berg Ng Ting-Yip) because he arrested him for killing a cat in his teens. According to The Master’s reading of his fate, Siu-tung will eventually kill someone and end up in prison for 20 years. He doesn’t much like the sound of that so he ends up going along with The Master’s zany plans to make him a nicer person and save two lives in the process. 

Ironically most of The Master’s suggestions still involve Siu-tung being imprisoned in some way. To get him out of his “unlucky” flat, he rents him another place that very much feels like a prison cell and later does actually lock him up inside a shed fearing that he’s about to kill. As he explains, it can help to preemptively accept your fate so moving in somewhere that is “like” a prison can stop you going there for real, but it doesn’t do much to alleviate Siu-tung’s desire to kill and most particularly to kill the policeman who has been following him most of his life because he’s “sure” that he’s going to commit a serious crime. Repeatedly describing him as “vermin”, the policeman has no confidence that Siu-tung could “change” and thinks he’s already past redemption while The Master quite reasonably asks if it’s fair to persecute him in this way just because he happened to be born different.

The Master’s question provokes another about free will and responsibility and if anything is really anyone’s fault if it’s all down to Fate in which case the role of the policeman becomes almost moot. He is also resisting his own fate in his intense fear of mental illness which he worries he will inherit from his parents each of whom suffered from some kind of mental distress. This fear has caused him retreat from life and it seems may have contributed another’s suicide while his divination has an otherwise manic quality as he finds himself constantly trying to outwit Fate. The two men soon find themselves in a battle with the skies, remarking that God is striking back every time they make a move to try and change their destiny. 

Eventually The Master rationalises that a plant must wither before it fruits, allowing himself to slip into “madness” as means of rejecting his fate. His strategies become wilder and finally seem as if they might lead him to kill which would certainly be one way of altering Siu-tung’s destiny if ironically, while conversely something does indeed seem to change for Siu-tung who is understandably concerned by The Master’s increasingly erratic behaviour but has escaped his desire to kill. Then again, could this all not be Fate too, how would you know if you’d overcome it? As The Master comes to accept, the path maybe set but the way you walk it is up to you. Only by accepting his Fate can he free himself from it. There may be a more subversive reading to found in Cheang’s depiction of Hong Kong as a rain-soaked prison in which lives are largely defined by forces outside of their control, but he does at least suggest that his heroes have more power than they think even if it relies on a contradiction in the active choice to embrace one’s fate. 

Mad Fate screens July 22 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © MakerVille Company Limited and Noble Castle Asia Limited

Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話, Amos Why, 2023)

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Have we become too dependent on our phones, allowing them to divide rather than connect us? For those at the centre of Amos Why’s zeitgeisty comedy Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話), they do seem to have become a double-edged sword. Yet in the end, it’s a series of handsets that reconnect them with their youth if only to remind them of the disappointed hopes of a defeated middle-age given additional an weight by subtle hints of post-Handover despair. 

Asked why he’s decided to move to the UK, Raymond (Peter Chan Charm-Man) replies that everybody’s doing it even if he resented being sent away to study in Aberdeen, Scotland as a teenager in the wake of the Handover. The real reason is that he’s got himself involved in a lot of shady stuff and has just had his phone hacked so he fears blackmail or arrest. He’s organised a farewell dinner with old high school friends Chit (Endy Chow Kwok-Yin) and An (Rosa Maria Velasco), but nothing quite goes to plan in the curious ways the lives of three former friends remain entwined even if they’ve all been in some sense corrupted by the changes in their society. “All is well as long as we never change” reads a teenage message to a future self, but of course it’s a promise that can’t be kept even if in the end, “life must go on anyway.”

Still, the society itself is fairly corrupt given the prevalence of scams many of them connected to our phones. Raymond failed to get his hacked phone fixed and opted for a new number instead, but Ana in particular keeps getting weird calls from him she later realises must be an attempt to scam her out of money by someone posing as Raymond and explaining that he needs money desperately. But Ana is also the victim of another “scam” in the form of Chit’s new business strategy of getting a “monthly fee” from clients rather than be reliant on work for hire arrangements. Even the restaurant itself along with its “Japanese” chef seems to be fraudulent, while An remains preoccupied with her husband’s womanising and Raymond ironically with his series of bad decisions that culminate in tax fraud. Meanwhile Raymond’s daughter Yanki (Amy Tang Lai-Ying) is also indulging in a kind of scamming selling intimate pictures to nerdy guys via telegram and smartphone apps and ironically remarking that she doesn’t want to get scammed again when discussing ever increasing payment options with her hapless targets.

Yet as Chit discovers when he leaves his phone at home, everything seems inconvenient when you’re phoneless. In a running gag, he repeatedly tries to borrow someone’s landline but is refused leaving him wandering around the city looking for a “restaurant” in one of three very similarly named redeveloped blocks. His wife’s is the only number he remembers by heart, but she remains resentful of his meeting up with Ana, his first love, whom he previously described as a “gullible” auntie and is on some level “scamming” by convincing her to keep him on a monthly retainer. Raymond’s phone threatens to expose him, Ana uses hers to spy on her husband and stepson, and Chit’s in a sense incapacitates him, leaving him alone and disorientated in his own city no longer certain how to travel around it amid the rapidly changing landscape and seemingly identical redevelopment projects.

Life hasn’t turned out the way any of them thought it would, recalling their carefree days 25 years previously in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Banners advertise a “New Era”, but the trio are trapped in the past with which they are eventually reconnected thanks to the retro handsets that unlike the technology of today still work and contain a series of time capsule messages to their future selves. History in a sense repeats itself as Raymond prepares to leave, but each is able to come to terms with their unfinished business and begin making concrete decisions about their futures. Suddenly “can we meet on Saturday?” takes on a new sense of poignancy when everyone seems to be leaving but then again, perhaps our phones really do connect us even if they sometimes connect us to scammers or people we don’t really want to talk to. Subtly hinting a sense of disappointment which runs a little deeper than middle-age malaise, Why looks back to the carefree days of 1997 allying the broken dreams of youth with the “New Era” of today but nevertheless grants his heroes a sense of new sense of possibility even the face of their despair. 

Everyphone Everywhere screens July 20 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © 2023 Dot 2 Dot Creation Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Nomad (烈火青春, Patrick Tam, 1982)

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In his 1982 New Wave classic Nomad (烈火青春), director Patrick Tam had intended to reflect on Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom along with the concept of the wanderer, a heroic ideal of the emancipated mind which necessitates permanent exile in which it is no longer possible to call any place “home”. It was also he claims a critique of the “mindless embrace of foreign culture” by Hong Kong youth then obsessed with David Bowie and Japan. 

The film’s English title refers to the boat owned by the hero’s father which becomes a symbol of the yearning for escape and for the foreign among the young, but is also imbued with an essential irony thanks to its design which recalls the “black ships” that sailed into the bay of Edo and forced Japan to reopen its doors to the world after 200 years of isolation. The original Chinese title, meanwhile, translates as something like “Burning Youth” and strongly recalls Japan’s Sun Tribe movies of the late 1950s which similarly critiqued aimless post-war youth and the corruptions of pervasive American pop culture as embodied by Coca-Cola and jazz music. Tam makes frequent visual reference to Japanese New Wave youth movies such as Nagisa Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth while the shocking ending (which was not shot by Tam who had envisioned a bloodier showdown aboard the Nomad) also has shades of Ko Nakahira’s seminal chronicle of post-war ennui, Crazed Fruit. 

Nomad similarly focusses on a collection of aimless youngsters struggling to find direction in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Louis (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing) continues to long for his absent mother and often listens to recordings she once made introducing classical music on the radio while a model of the Nomad sits prominently on a shelf in his room. He has posters of David Bowie on the wall, while his cousin Kathy (Pat Ha Man-Jik) puts on the robes of a Japanese Miko and performs a traditional fan dance. Louis is one of the few young people who does not speak the language, but is later fascinated by the work of a Japanese fashion designer featuring swords and samurai armour that he says, in a moment of foreshadowing, only make him think of ritual suicide. 

His life is directly contrasted with that of Pong (Kent Tong Chun-Yip), a young man from a poor family who works as a lifeguard at the local pool which is how he ends up meeting Kathy who in turn fascinates him with her rich girl sense of confidence and invincibility. The desire to find a place of their own is emphasised by the constant frustration their repeated attempts to make love in Pong’s family apartment which everyone has generously agreed to vacate so he can bring a girl home only for his younger brother to prank him and his dad to come home early inviting half the neighbourhood over for mahjong. The couple eventually have sex on the empty top deck of a tram, another symbol of transience, and then repeatedly in several other public locations until the relationship is disrupted by the return of Kathy’s former boyfriend, Shinsuke (Yung Sai-Kit), who has deserted the Japanese Red Army and is now a fugitive ironically looking for safe harbour while on the run.

The Japanese Red Army was a far-left terrorist organisation most active in the Middle East though Shinsuke’s decision to leave it seems to be less to do with a disillusionment with communism than a reawakening of his humanity in which he has decided he can no longer be a part of its bloodiness and violence. Nevertheless, while holed up aboard the Nomad, he explains that he cannot join the other youngsters in their romantic dream of sailing to Arabia because he has rejected exile and is determined to return home and meet his certain death in Japan. The destructive forces have however followed him in the form of an assassin posing as an assistant to a fashion designer, which seems to be allusion a little too on the nose even if it quickly descends into a strange pastiche of samurai ideology otherwise at odds with that of the JRA in which they track Shinsuke down and then instruct him to commit seppuku with the sword he has been carrying all along. 

In an earlier fight that led Pong and Louis becoming friends, some young women had needled him that he should try to protect Kathy though she needed no protection in this situation and he was unable to provide it anyway. Something similar happens on the beach though he turns out to be surprisingly adept with a samurai sword when he’s unexpectedly rescued by Tomato (Cecilia Yip Tung), a young woman he met in a cafe after he overheard her desperately trying to dump one boyfriend and not be be dumped by another over two different telephones, who suddenly reemerges with a harpoon gun. It’s Tomato, who had kept a copy of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist given to her by a boyfriend but apparently not read it, that finally remarks on their aimlessness, “we do nothing for society”, only to be countered by Louis who answers, “what society? We are society.”

Briefly at the beach they may find the kind of utopia they’re looking for, lighting the cottage with lanterns and sleeping piled one on top of another under a communal mosquito net in the open air, but just as quickly find that dream shattered by the intrusion of a political reality. This nomadic youth finds itself exiled from its home, dreaming of an impossible escape, caught between the colonial present and a colonial future with half an eye on an old coloniser and fast losing sight of its own identity. Abandoned on a blood-soaked shore, all youth can do is look out in shock and confusion bereft even of hope in a liminal space at once transient and permanent. 

Nomad screens at the BFI Southbank on 15th July in its new 4K Director’s Cut as part of Focus Hong Kong.

Let It Ghost (猛鬼3寶, Wong Hoi, 2022)

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A collection of conflicted souls find themselves haunted by the ills of their society in the directorial debut from Wong Hoi, Let it Ghost (猛鬼3寶). Very much in the tradition of Hong Kong horror comedy, the three-part anthology takes pot shots at everything from hypocritical, narcissistic TV stars, and chauvinistic, homophobic men, to familial displacement caused by rampant gentrification while asking questions about who is haunting who in a society which seems to be constantly eroding around the edges.

The hero of the first chapter, Lark, is a self-centred actor currently playing the lead in the hit TV show Incarcerated Detective in which he has the nonsensical catchphrase “Justice will always stand on the side of Justice”. Though playing a figure of moral authority onscreen, Lark is privately anything but and is becoming fed up with the show because it’s getting in the way of his burgeoning movie career. Wong makes some subtle digs at how the entertainment industry works with Lark kept out at a drinking party with useful people he clearly doesn’t like but has to get along with while needing to get back for night shoots. When he gets pulled over by a cop, he panics because he’s been drinking but it turns out the guy was just a fan who wants an autograph. The policeman’s failure to investigate him turns deadly when a sleepy Lark ends up running over a young woman and then pushing her body down a mountain to conceal the crime. 

Lark finds himself quite literally haunted by the spectre of his guilt when he realises that the young woman he killed was the guest actress for the episode in which she was supposed to be playing a ghost. Taking method acting to extremes, she turns up anyway prompting some ironic comments from the director about representation and the Hong Kong spirit before he makes full use of her now unkillable body to get exactly the effect he wants for the scene. A late twist hints at Lark’s self-obsession and insecurity if also perhaps the mutability of stardom in which no one is ever really irreplaceable. 

Like Lark, the hero of the second chapter, Kwan, is also somewhat insecure but mostly in his lowly status as a taxi driver while his materialistic girlfriend appears resentful that he can’t give her a standard of life to match that of her snotty rich girl friends. In a recurrent motif, Kwan keeps making a point that he isn’t “homophobic” but several times makes homophobic remarks and later tells a young woman that the boys love manga she’s reading “defies the Chinese values of man and wife”, while titles of books in his cab include “cute wife, obey me tonight” and “Domineering Driver and the Dainty Wife”. An attempt to impress his girlfriend with a cheap “staycation” backfires when she is possessed by a “horny ghost” whose insatiable appetites eventually become more than he can handle. The film walks a fine line between satirising Kwan’s toxic masculinity and patriarchal views and accidentally endorsing them, potentially spilling over into homophobia in the punchline of its possession gag. 

In part three meanwhile, the venue is a moribund shopping mall where a young woman runs a bridal shop inherited from her mother. The half-shuttered mall already has a ghostly quality, as Fong points out no one goes to malls anymore, and it could in a sense be she and her friends that are haunting it though there is a more literal ghost of an abandoned child as a kind of symbol of the “orphans” of gentrification displaced from their homes and left with nowhere to go. Fong and her friend Edward decide to look for a nice couple to look after the ghost, Kat, who would then be reincarnated as their child but struggle with unexpected interference from a kung fu exorcist working for security who want to get rid of Kat so the building can be sold. 

There is quite a lot of haunting going on, be it the grim spectres of celebrity culture, sexism, or the gradual erasure of the old society which brings about its own ghosts in the eerie sense of emptiness with which abandoned buildings are imbued. Cynical humour and a thick slice of irony lend each of these ghostly tales a satirical quality hinting at the unreality of the everyday marked by a sense of displacement and emptiness in a disappearing Hong Kong. 

Let It Ghost screens at the BFI Southbank on 14th July as part of Focus Hong Kong.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

ReFashioned (Joanna Bowers, 2021)

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At the beginning of the consumerist era, our mentalities began to shift away from durability to disposability and we only desired that which we could throw away. But every time we throw something we don’t need anymore over our shoulder, the pile of discarded items grows higher and is already beginning to overshadow us. Joanna Bowers’ documentary ReFashioned examines the environmental impact of fast fashion and follows a series of Hong Kongers working towards initiatives to encourage recycling or reuse of textiles and plastic. 

The change in our mindset is most clearly reflected in the startup created by an American expat to sell secondhand children’s outfits in which the concept of pre-owned clothing is itself sold as something “new”. As she points out, in Chinese culture there has long been a resistance to the idea of buying secondhand born of the fear of inheriting the bad luck of the previous owner though there seems to be less class-based stigma as might be found in the West where there has often been a sense of shame connected to dressing one’s children in handmedowns. Similarly, where parents might once have given away clothing their children had outgrown to friends and relatives they may now be less likely to do so if think they still have monetary value. Donations to charity shops and thrift stores may suffer the same fate ironically depriving those who cannot afford to buy brand new of the opportunity to buy at all. 

Meanwhile, another interviewee remarks that the battle still lies in the mind of the consumer who remains unconvinced by the idea of recycling when they know that most of what they recycle ends up in landfill anyway. A government-backed initiative aims for a new approach in the recycling of textiles in which a robotised production line can sort by colour, respin thread, and produce new knitted garments while other less versatile fibres can be repurposed for carpets and upholstery. They have an end goal of creating a system in which the consumer would be able to bring their old clothes and have them deconstructed and remade by the machine into new designs allowing them to upcycle items they believed had simply gone out of style. Then again, the fashion show they put on to showcase their achievements is geared less towards the everyday than the catwalk which is admittedly designed to prove to brands that recycled material is just as good as brand new but perhaps also leans in to a fast fashion mentality if only more sustainably rather than returning to an age of well made garments designed for longterm use. 

It should also be noted that the documentary received funding from high street clothing store H&M whose efforts towards sustainability are given prominent mention which also suggests that sustainability must be made compatible with the consumerist mindset rather than undercutting it. The problem is largely of economics in that it simply does not make sense to recycle when the costs outweigh the benefits to the average business. Another young man has started a company planning to recycle plastic bottles and himself admits that his end goal would also be to reduce their usage in the first place and make himself irrelevant but in any case is told by prospective investors that the business has little viability because of its logistical costs and small scale. This would seem to be the barrier to the creation of the “circular economy” proposed by some of the other interviewees.

The earlier part of the documentary had reflected on the changing economic fortunes of Hong Kong in which textile magnates from Shanghai had set up factories in the city but once the Mainland began to open itself up in the 1980s moved there to take advantage of significantly reduced labour costs leaving many local people unemployed. There is then something quite remarkable in the decision to redevelop a former textile mill as an ultramodern recycling centre, the first of its kind in Hong Kong and perhaps the world, avoiding the additional energy costs of deconstruction and reconstruction while saving the unique architecture of a mid-20th century industrial building. This is perhaps the ultimate example of “refashioning” demonstrating how the old can be adapted for use by the new, even if sustainable solutions for our increasingly consumerist lifestyles still feel very far away. 

ReFashioned Dream Home streamed as part of this year’s Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season.

Original trailer (English dialogue)

Dream Home (維多利亞壹號, Pang Ho-cheung, 2010)

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“In a crazy city, if one is to survive, he’s got to be more crazy.” according to the opening titles of Pang Ho-cheung’s surprisingly poignant slasher satire Dream Home (維多利亞壹號). In the 10 years since the handover, the average wage has increased by a measly 1% while house prices have risen by 15% in 2007 alone. Sheung’s (Josie Ho) one overriding mission in life is to buy a flat for her family to live in, but it’s clear that her struggles to become a homeowner aren’t the only pressure points in her life in an increasingly capitalistic society. 

As we later discover, Sheung is set on one particular flat because the building it’s in stands on the spot where she once lived as a child before her family was pushed out by rampant gentrification. In essence, she’s just trying to take back what’s hers and restore her family’s sense of dignity and security. A flashback to her childhood reveals her father’s own insecurity in having been unable to secure a larger living space in which she and her brother could have their own rooms while her grandfather, a sailor, longed for a sea view and the sense of an expanding horizon otherwise denied to the family in a cramped Hong Kong council flat. In a touch of irony, Sheung’s father himself worked in construction building apartment blocks he couldn’t afford to live in and in the end it killed it him through exposure to asbestos and other dangerous fibres. 

Sheung works at a bank but is conflicted about her job cold calling account holders to try to get them to buy into dodgy loans neatly echoing the film’s closing moments which hint at a coming economic crash precipitated by the subprime mortgage crisis which will threaten Sheung’s homeowning dream. Her friends think she’s crazy to buy a flat at all, but she’s completely fixated on repairing her broken childhood by taking back her family home and ending her displacement. Meanwhile, she’s in a dissatisfying dead end relationship with a married man which largely takes place in love hotels he sticks her with the bill for and turns up late to only to immediately fall asleep. When Sheung asks him for a loan to help pay for her father’s medical care after the insurance she got for him is voided because he never told her he’d been diagnosed with a lung complaint before she took it out, he tells her to use her deposit fund instead and give up on homeownership because only fools like her would buy in such a volatile market. 

Disappointment in both her personal and professional lives continues to place a strain on Sheung’s fragile mental state that eventually tips her over the edge. Hoping to bring the apartment’s price down, she goes on a murder spree in the building killing it seems partly out of resentment and otherwise pure practicality. There is irony here too, in that she kills her victims with the weapons of their privilege. A cheating husband who comes home unexpectedly after lying to his wife that he’s gone golfing but was actually with his mistress is whacked on the head with a golf club while an obnoxious stoner kid is stabbed in the neck with his bong. Sheung murders a Filipina helper, but also the snooty middle-class woman who employed her by using the vacuum pack machine the helper had been using on her behalf. One might ask if she really needed to kill the helper or the pair of Mainland sex workers in the next apartment, but when it comes to devaluing property prices “massacre” sounds much better than “killing” and so it’s the more the merrier. 

In the end, it’s this city that’s driven her out of her mind with its status-obsessed consumerism and constant sense of impossibility. After her killing spree, she doesn’t even seem very conflicted about selling dodgy loans to vulnerable people not so different from herself while she was so desperately trying to get approval on a mortgage there was no way she could afford despite working a series of other part-time jobs including one selling designer handbags to the kind of wealthy women she resents. Her dream apartment has a view quite literally to kill for, though there’s a sense that Sheung’s dream will always be futile with the same motivations that brought her here leading to the mortgage crisis and economic shock that could eventually take it from her. Bloody, gory, and at times sickeningly violent Pang’s satirical horror show paints contemporary capitalism as the real villain and even in its dark humour reserves its sympathies for the wounded Sheung pushed to breaking point by a pressure cooker society. 

Dream Home available to stream in the UK until 30th June as part of this year’s Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Full Strike (全力扣殺, Derek Kwok & Henri Wong, 2015)

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A former badminton champ begins to rediscover herself after being permanently banned for bullying behaviour when charged with coaching a bunch of former bank robbers in Derek Kwok & Henri Wong’s zany sports comedy Full Strike (全力扣殺). Dedicated to “all the beautiful losers”, the film is less about literal winning as it is about learning to turn one’s life around in moments of profound despair and draw strength from even non-literal victories in simply refusing to be looked down or belittled.

It’s ironic in a sense that Dan (Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin), Kun (Wilfred Lau Ho-Lung), and Chiu (Edmond Leung Hon-Man) became bank robbers because they didn’t want to be bullied having grown up as friendless orphans. Former badminton champ Kau Sau (Josie Ho Chiu-Yee), meanwhile, was such as tyrannical diva that she gained the nickname “The Beast” before being banned because of her unsportsmanlike behaviour and treatment of her long-suffering assistant. But cast out of the sports world, she’s become a dejected layabout not quite working in her brother’s restaurant and otherwise hiding out from the world. Her life changes when she’s publicly mocked after running into her former assistant who has since gone to take her position as a reigning champion. Running out into the night, she spots a shuttle-cock-shaped meteor and is chased to a badminton club by what she assumes is an “alien” but might have just been a frightened homeless man.

In any case, she takes it as a sign she should pick up a racket once again which as Dan later points out she probably wanted to do anyway and was just waiting for an excuse. He can’t explain why he chose the unlikely path of becoming a badminton player to help him turn over a new leaf after leaving prison but reflects that perhaps you don’t really need a reason only the desire to change. Dan, Kun, and Chiu all developed disabilities as a result of their life of crime but slowly discover that they can actually help them on the court in a literal process of making the most of their life experiences no matter how negative they might have assumed them to be while Kau Sau similarly regains her self esteem while acknowledging the destructive patterns of her previous behaviour careful never to bully her new teammates as they all square off against her bullying cousin “nipple sucking Cheung” (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) who tries to use his newfound wealth to cover up a lack of skill by hiring Kau Sau’s old teammate. 

Cheung is also trying to overcome low self-esteem and is later forced to realise that becoming a champion won’t really change that much about how he sees himself, though apparently still relying on an ever capable middle-aged woman to fight (literally) his battles for him. Meanwhile, the gang are coopted by a media mogul hoping to make an inspirational documentary about them but also manipulating their lives and hyper fixating on their criminal pasts to the point of staging a fake arrest as they enter the stadium for a competition. Doubting the chances of success in setting up new lives for themselves as badminton players, Chiu is drawn back towards a life of crime while feeling somewhat distanced from the team as a tentative romance between Kau Sau and Dan seems to fall otherwise flat.

A throwback to classic mou lei tau nonsense comedy, the zany gags come thick and fast but are at times over reliant on low humour while the central premise of staking everything on an “unexciting” game like badminton perhaps wears a little thin by the time it gets to the high stakes finale with the heroes fighting twin battles squaring off against their traumatic pasts rather than the literal opponents in front of them. Winning becomes a kind of irrelevance when the contest was within the self. Each rediscovering the spark of life, the players rediscover the will to live while bonding as a team and sticking to their training in pursuit of their goal. Kwok and Wong lay it on a little thick with the martial arts parody in the uphill battle to master badminton but otherwise lend a poignant sense of warmth and genuine goodwill in sympathy with the underdogs’ quest if not quite to win then to own their loserdom on their on terms in reclaiming their self-respect and dignity. 

Full Strike is available to stream in the UK until 30th June as part of this year’s Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Focus Hong Kong Returns to BFI Southbank 12th to 15th July

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Focus Hong Kong returns to the BFI this July with three highly anticipated recent releases and the long-awaited restoration of a 1980s classic.

Where the Wind Blows

Philip Yung’s long-awaited return after 2015’s Port of Call is a complex historical epic exploring the corruptions of colonialism as morally compromised cops Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Chiu-wai forge dangerous connections with organised crime. Review.

A Guilty Conscience

A cynical lawyer’s existence is upended when a case he’d assumed would be easy ends in a bereaved mother being sent to prison for seventeen years for a crime she almost certainly did not commit in this often hilarious courtroom drama which puts social inequality on trial. Review.

Let it Ghost

Comedic horror anthology mixing scares and satire from first time director Wong Hoi.

Nomad (4K Restoration, Director’s Cut)

Heavily censored on its release, Patrick Tam’s 1982 classic stars a young Leslie Cheung as an aimless young man from a wealthy family who spends his time hanging out with friends at the beach until his cousin’s romance with a fugitive from the Japanese Red Army threatens to upset their idle days.

Screenings take place at the BFI, London, 12th to 15th July. Tickets are already on sale via the cinema’s website and you can keep up to date with all the latest news via Focus Hong Kong’s official website, Facebook Page, Twitter account, and Instagram channel.