Discoveries from Hong Kong SAR China World Cinema

Drama from Hong Kong directed by Mok Hong-See.

Hong Kong Horror film directed by Wong Hok-Sing

In a capitalist city, where people have kids to be proud of, a woman - Rose unexpectedly gives birth to a cat son. The Baby doesn’t behave as an ordinary baby and Rose struggles to love him. Rose tries her best to change him, even if it means changing his true nature. However, to find a connection she will need to learn to love him for whom he is and to remember something about herself that she has forgotten a long time ago.

Re-think Aloud - A Documentary on “Contemporary Writing for Theatre (2012-2023)

He is going back to Hong Kong. He wanders in the city, meets with his friends. This is his last day in Taipei, where he has complicated feelings for.

A Chinese pop musical

Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.

Yunnan girl Xiangnan, coming from a poor family, was married off to Hong Kong in exchange for a generous dowry. She lives in the remote area of Lau Fau Shan with her elderly husband. As a stranger in a foreign land, Xiangnan feels lost both in Hong Kong and back home, unable to find a space of her own. She dreams of escape, yet feels trapped like a small boat adrift in the sea, tossed by the waves with no way forward or back. In her helplessness, Xiangnan begins to converse with different versions of herself, searching for a place to coexist with herself. Birth and death, unity and separation, living and survival—all dissolve into silence. The story unfolds in scattered, fragmented memories, mostly reflecting Xiangnan’s daily life. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of her mother, Xiangnan as a child, and Xiangnan herself, moving through different spaces in Lau Fau Shan—sometimes in contrast, sometimes in harmony.

This movie depicts a pair of lovers, who were denied freedom of marriage during their lives, and after their deaths, they are transformed into mischievous ghosts. With their strange and unpredictable powers, they are able to frighten all the characters in the play. The bridegroom, the policeman, the dancers, etc., are all frightened by the ghosts. The only one who is lucky enough to meet them is Charlie, who makes a lot of jokes.

With the form of remote audio conversation for its main narrative, the essay film consists of four chapters, each of which has its own focus but is also interconnected with each other. Blending voice narratives in four languages, moving images and literary texts, the film is mainly made from home video collections created in the 1990s from both filmmakers’ families, with home videos shot in the 1960s by a Hong Kong family as interludes. The film not only unfolds how East Asian families created their own image with amateur filming devices but also tells stories of migration, travelling, growing and familial relationships.​

Cut & paste film that uses footage from the South Korean movie Testimony [1973], directed by Im Kwon-taek.

The first Cantonese talkie. It was produced in Shanghai (Tianyi Studio) and was based on a Cantonese opera play. DUPLICATE RECORD: See BAIJIN LONG

Romance of the Phoenix Chamber

The poignant drama centers on Mr. Chan, a passionate secondary school teacher dedicated to students with special educational needs (SEN). Adapting the approach of inclusive education by placing SEN students in mainstream schools, Mr. Chan's unwavering dedication is challenged by those around him including the largely indifferent principal who scoffed at the name of the symptoms, the vice-principal who is more a deal maker than an educator, fellow bullying students and the parents who face numerous hurdles with strength derived solely from their enduring motherly love. An unflinching look of Mr. Chan's and the mother of a SEN student raise the question: how to care for the SEN students without leaving them high and dry?

A colourful "fountain performance".

Award winning scriptwriter and director Ivy Ho returns with this Hong Kong crime story. A sexually motivated abduction leads to a car crash that brings together the lives of police officers, criminals and innocent members of the public on an eerily empty Hong Kong night. Rising star Derek Tsang leads an ensemble cast in a film that proves top-notch, noir tinged contemporary crime drama emanates from lands beyond Scandinavia.

Fai and Yi are an ordinary couple. When Fai becomes a quadriplegic after an accident, their lives face a drastic change with Yi becoming a full-time caregiver amidst financial difficulties. Yi eventually resorts to prostitution to make ends meet. Every time a customer comes, Yi hides Fai in the kitchen and have sex with the stranger in the living room. The couple’s dynamic changes as Yi vents her anger by abusing her husband, while Fai finds new meaning of existence through the pain and a macabre way to fulfill his duty as a husband. Alternating between desire and emotion, the couple floats in the river of desire, struggling to survive.

An eight-year-old kid has his first encounter with death when his grandmother commits suicide.

Translating and encapsulating the director's personal childhood experiences as well as past lived experiences, You build a home in my mind comprises of playground rides, the everyday scenery outside the window of the artist's studio, and unique, special objects recalled from memories—weaving together a melody that lures the viewers to roam and wander. As the boat navigates between reality and imagination, resembling a journey of constant loss and persistent search, the scenes become slightly different when they reappear, these scenes alluding to the repetitiveness and uncertainty of life.

The film tells the story of the bar's resident singer Lan Jiajia and four men from different generations who got together under the guidance of music. After they experienced the ups and downs of the brothers' bar and the joys and sorrows of life, they finally untied their hearts and helped them die. The Abu fulfilled his musical dream.

All participants must have a valid Hong Kong identity card or must be born in Hong Kong (with a valid birth certificate). While there has been other Miss Hong Kong pageants in prior years producing notable titleholders such as Judy Dann (1951), Virginia June Lee (1953), Michele Mok (1958), Laura da Costa (1967) and Mabel Hawkett (1970), the current annual TVB pageant began in 1973. Apart from the top prize winner, first runner-up and second runner-up prizes, the pageant also has other consolation prizes that vary slightly from year to year. Many Miss Hong Kong contestants have gone on to have movie careers as it is quite typical for the top contestants to garner television contracts from TVB.

Lee Wai Shing’s short film focuses on family in response to Huang Canran’s poem ‘So Close’, narrating a son’s journey to visit his mother in North Point

A silent, monochromatic mutiny against the machinery of time. An 'ownerless' man navigates an urban purgatory, bearing forensic witness to the solitude of the discarded.

The story is about the struggles of four young people: Before her boyfriend proposes, Tang chooses to study aircraft maintenance; Michael wants to save money for further study on music but is persuaded by a coworker to join a network marketing scheme; Chin Hung lost his way in youth by focusing only on soccer; and Chun Fei feels hopeless and lost about his future after failing a public exam. These four young people face setbacks in life. Will they seize the moment just before making a wish as a shooting star passes by, persist in their beliefs and spread their wings, or will they choose to give up?

Hong Kong horror movie from 1963.

A young girl who believes that the world will end in 2012 lives only for the present. Working in a bookstore, she spends her days on menial day-to-day tasks and sitting on a roof to anticipate the end of all things. One day, the bookstore owner tells the young girl that she can do more than just simply wait. In a world where the future appears bleak and hopeless, should we prepare for a painless end, or it possible for us to stand up and make a change?

He promised the woman (played by Qiu Yuru) that he would love her deeply, but who knew that he (played by Liang Chenrong) was actually a wolf wearing a mask, and then taught his daughter to embezzle public funds, causing her to be unhappy at work? , and it got worse day by day, until one day, when the woman came home, she found that the man had been with another woman.

Obsessed with ballroom dancing, Summer tries to achieve her best with her coach Tony. They build a complex, passionate but finally transient relationship throughout the pas de deux dancing steps.

Wai (Tiny Gary) is a film school graduate who has lost everything in post-1997 Hong Kong. Out of despair and anger, the cynical young man decided to live entirely off government allowance, leading a lonely, trashy life in a rented room of 100 square feet. Seven years have passed in a blink. This fateful year, Wai meets Mainland prostitute Mei (Gloria Poon) and the two begin living together in his tiny room. With his growing affection for Mei, Wai risks smuggling illegal drugs into China in order to earn some fast money for a better life with her.

A musical feature with Eason Chan.

The director spent her childhood living apart from her family and knew very little about its history. This changed when she graduated from college and decided to face her parents with her camera in a search for answers to questions about her past.

Woody, an average salaryman, is invited to go to Broken Dream Club every Thursday by his superior Michael. The club is a social meeting held for those who suffer from depression and are unable to fulfill their dream. Led by a bewitching therapist Lily, Woody encounters a group of eccentric people, for example, a football enthusiast who lost his legs, and of course, Michael, a single dad who raised his daughter only to lose her in a car accident. Woody finds it confusing whether to take a role as an outsider or to seek for relief like everyone else. The film constantly makes use of Brechtian effect to explore the interior of each character.

The Plight of a Lonely Girl

Hong Kong, twenty years later. The city is a perpetual construction site where the wheel of development must turn to build more shopping malls and higher residential towers. Enter members of the all-girl pop sensation, Heartbeat 48, an ever-expanding army of eco-warriors who are tasked with checking the heartbeats of centuries-old trees and villages and losing no time to pronounce their deaths. When Doy, an internet nerd and one of the few surviving village natives, is transported from the past into the fanciful realm of cute tutu outfits dresses, toy stethoscopes and hugging farewell routines – all staged for the benefit of the camera – he gets trapped a nightmare he can’t wake up from.

We can see things differently when we see things from different angles.

Young people are protesting on the streets of Hong Kong in order to bring about change. Air soaked with tear gas, the dark uniforms and loud commands of the police officers in the colourful umbrella sea of the protesters. In the midst of the action, the film documents a brand new protest movement.

A young Chinese teacher, Wu Yu, searches for the hit-and-run driver responsible for her mother’s death. As she tries to understand her mother’s faith, Buddhist principles slowly grow in Wu Yu and start appeasing her pain. But her quest for justice soon isolates her from the rest of the world: her husband wants to negotiate a cash compensation, and Buddhist beliefs require her to let go of her demand since destiny should bring justice in the next life. All Wu Yu asks for is to meet the driver face to face. If only she could find him…

Booklovers, booksellers, storytellers and writers can easily squeeze into various demos of important issues. This documentary brings this group of people in the limelight, discussing the value of art space in bookshops. The book-loving director Kong King Chu visited independent bookshops in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia for three to four years, tried to understand how a bookshop can become a dynamic, inspiring and heartwarming space, even these booksellers carry different attitude towards life, books and community, as well as management beliefs. These booksellers do not care about the commercial value emphasized by the capitalist society and they are content in their own way by sharing their enthusiasm about books with the others in spite of all difficulties. Thus, they keep trying new methods to sharpen their touch on social issues and become an important starting point for the general public to reflect upon conflicts in our society.

June 2019 is a month of deep gloom as protestors flood the streets and voice out against the extradition bill. Chu Hoi Ying, who is from Hong Kong, collaborates with Argentinian director Tomas Zabala as Chu visits her childhood memories and looks for a comfortable HABITAT, in more ways than one.

Four years have passed since the event. Lost and changed, Ling returns to the society, uncertain about her future. People around her avoid talking about what has transpired, their meaningful whispers echoing in the void. One night, Ling meets her younger self from four years ago. They try but know not how to talk to each other. With the scar still throbbing, should the older express regret or encouragement for the younger? Would the younger question the older, can she sympathise with what she is yet to learn? An extraordinary time travel story about the melancholic self-reflection of one’s whereabouts, in the past and in the future.

On a free day of school, a young girl joined her father and his colleague Ah Ching on the road to deliver goods to several companies. While eating the egg puffs she received at their first stop, she started questioning her dad about her mother in the car. At their next stop she secretly went back to the car to get more egg puffs, but ended up discovering her daddy’s secret.

Twenty years ago, Charlie came to Hong Kong to work as a domestic helper. Not only did she leave her home country Philippine, she also left her husband and her six-year-old son.Close to her retirement, she looks forward to going back home and living with her son again. However, her dream does not come true as she wishes…

When the flower inexplicably does not bloom, grotesque measures have to be taken. Flower shop employee Molly is passionate about flowers and plants. She understands by instinct that plants are intellectual and capable of communication. With acute sensitivity, Molly could quickly locate and exterminate bugs hidden in the plants. Up in the shop’s attic is where she experiments in breeding a brand new species of flower, which makes no progress. When the flower finally blossoms, there are some changes with Molly’s body…The illusions cultivated from our hearts—will they become true if we believe strongly? With obsession and fanatical beliefs, a path of ruins beyond redemption awaits for Molly.

Try as he might, Fi Cheung can’t rid himself of a profound motion sickness and insecurity associated with living on land. Harking back to a childhood overflowing with adventure and fantasy, he recounts anecdotes of quasi-sci-fi scenarios featuring the notorious pirate Cheung Po-tsai with whom his grandpa claimed lineage and Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, vanquishing a giant sea monster amid tensions between navy troops of both sides of the Straits! Those were the fishing days of counting on divine providence to weather the harsh elements of nature. Now heading north for one final destination on the eve of resuming his sea-faring days, Fi follows the clues on the treasure map bequeathed by his grandpa on a hunt for a treasure irrevocably lost but not forgotten.

If a goddess has come down to earth, could she bring back lost time for man? Ning takes a substitute teaching position at a rural school, hoping to find inspiration for her novel from nature. One day after class, students Richard and LAM Mak-noeng, a mysteriously masked girl who shares the same name as the Empress of Heaven, come to her for help. It turns out that Mak-noeng is about to disappear. Faced with such an ethereal problem, Ning takes on the responsibility of a storyteller and seeks a happy ending for this heavenly romance. The director, who has always been interested in urban issues, has continued to mix historical and fantastical elements like he has done with Interview with Lo-Ting: An Oral History Project (2022). A modern love story with celestial inspiration, the film gently caresses the remnants of our city and the melancholy of lonely souls.

Will they meet again, or is it already the end?

One day in the 70s, at the Northern New Territories.  Under the brazing sun, the sound of cicadas intertwined with the rotten smell near the train tracks. The five youngsters could not dismiss the summer blues. They pushed the weeds and stepped on the squirming maggots. They found a decaying dead body trapped under the burning sun. It was oozing a foul stench.  They covered their nose and vomited. Hearing the train whined, the youngsters made up their minds.  Even though they did not have much, they answered the call from the syrup and caffeine. They added colour to their lives with a pinch of salt onto the transparent White Cloud, and they dashed in full strength and leaped up.

Music documentary with Faye Wong.

The first Hong Kong-made Huangmei opera film.

Love in the Gaze of a Panopticon

HK horror film.