Hong Kong, as a place and symbol, has transformed over the last century. As first a British colony and then a Special Administrative Region in China, Hong Kong has retained its unique identity as a site where influences from the East and West intermingle to shape its iconic skyline. Nowhere is the indelible personality of Hong Kong architecture more evident than in its housing, itself the basis for countless classic Hong Kong films. While the topic may not be new, the question of what home looks like in Hong Kong, both for its citizens and its cinema, has gained newfound resonance in the 21st Century.
This question frames the presentation of Home in Hong Kong, a season highlighting various films from the last decade. Through different historical eras and wildly disparate genres, these films traverse from tenement housing to upscale penthouse apartments, to pose greater questions about how we define the word “home”. Above all, Home in Hong Kong asks us to grapple with how that definition has changed in a tumultuous year to ultimately ponder both where we can reclaim a semblance of home and with whom we will share that home.'
PROGRAMME
Sunday January 10th, 2021
ECHOES OF THE RAINBOW
Dir. Alex Law | Hong Kong | 2010 | 117mins
A surprise hit when it premiered in the Berlin Film Festival, Alex Law's winsome drama lovingly recreates the storefronts of Wing Lee Street to chart one family's joys and tragedies in the early 1960s. Filtered through the eyes of precocious Chun-yi (Buzz Chung), the film's unabashed nostalgia imbues the world of Law's own childhood with a generous wealth of detail. Yet the film's elegiac tone extends beyond mere sentimentality to depict one family's struggle against forces that are both preternatural and socially ordained. As an affectionate ode to a bygone era that remains knowingly aware of that era's fallibilities, Echoes of the Rainbow is a bittersweetly beguiling snapshot of home in the past tense.
Tuesday January 12th, 2021
DREAM HOME
Dir. Pang Ho-cheung | Hong Kong | 2010 | 96 minutes
Pang Ho-cheung's shockingly brutal Dream Home is a disarmingly vicious satire disguised as a slasher flick. A young woman (Josie Ho) scrimps and saves to purchase the luxurious penthouse apartment overlooking the Victoria Harbor she's pined for since childhood. But a series of setbacks send her on a murderous rampage in that very building, leaving a slew of corpses in her bloody wake. Pang's gory melodrama tests our sympathies for its anti-heroine as she moves from one literally eye-popping set piece to the next, all whilst laying bare the greed, privilege, and exploitation of Hong Kong's cutthroat housing market. With no easy resolutions and plenty of outrageous imagery, Dream Home is a morally ambivalent thrill ride that's certainly not for the squeamish.
Friday January 15th, 2021
Dir. Chun Wong | Hong Kong | 2017 | 101 minutes
Tung (Shawn Yue) returns home to live with his father (Eric Tsang) in a crowded tenement building after an extended stay in a mental health institution. As he tries picking up the pieces of the life he left behind, Tung's struggles with bipolar depression threaten his precarious standing within the building's community. Mental illness has featured in Hong Kong tenement films of the past, but rarely with as much dignity and compassion as in Wong Chun's directorial debut. His portrait of familial strife pinpoints social rifts within Hong Kong with clear-eyed empathy and subtle political indignation. Yet it is the near-universal yearning for a place to belong which fuels Mad World's aching heart, honoring, with quiet grace, those who persist in that search.
