Dir. Fruit Chan
1997, Hong Kong, 109 min
Cantonese with English subtitles
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, director Fruit Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The result is a tough, pessimistic film, a portrait of a city on the brink that follows the drifting of high school dropout and wannabe Triad tough Autumn Moon (Sam Lee, in a star-making role, opposite a largely nonprofessional cast), who sees little hope for his future or that of his home as a newly created Special Administrative Region within China. A raw, groundbreaking drama and portrait of nihilistic youth in the same vein as Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), and The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995), the film poses questions that remain burningly relevant as tumult engulfs Hong Kong. The 4K restoration was carried out in the Hong Kong and Bologna headquarters of L’Immagine Ritrovata, made from the original camera negative with the supervision of director Fruit Chan and cinematographer O Sing-Pui.
“Fruit Chan’s quirky, gangster-adjacent flick, so infused with washed-out and blue-filtered imagery, presents a portrait of Hong Kong that bears more than a passing resemblance to Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle’s early collaborations.” – Pat Brown, Slant Magazine
“Fruit Chan’s bleak tale of alienated youth should appeal to anyone who has ever felt the future slipping away from them.” – Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry
For Asian Heritage Month, the Dave Barber Cinematheque presents three newly restored films of the Hong Kong New Wave that explore the rapidly changing urban landscape and socioeconomic anxieties of Hong Kong – Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997), Patrick Tam’s My Heart is That Eternal Rose (1989) and Lawrence Lau’s Spacked Out (2000). These films trace the expiration of the British lease on Hong Kong and the looming handover to China, spanning a time of significant social and political transformation, and revealing an atmosphere of alienation and uncertainty. This sense of impending change provided the backdrop against which the Hong Kong New Wave would emerge.
