Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, 1997)

 

Shot on a shoestring budget with non-professional actors, Fruit Chan’s acclaimed breakthrough was one of the first great post-Handover films. Recapturing the spirit of the Hong Kong New Wave, Chan follows a trio of teenaged misfits as they try to navigate a world of crime, poverty, abuse, and inadequate health care, haunted as much by the ghost of a mysterious girl as they are the lost ideals of Hong Kong and its cinema. Made in Hong Kong set a new model for independent production in Hong Kong, filmmaking outside the constraints of the old studios or Mainland censors.

 

Series Description from guest programmer, Sean Gilman:

"Hong Kong cinema blossomed in the 1960s and 70s with bright colorful musicals and astoundingly acrobatic martial arts spectacles. It reached international prominence in the 80s and early 90s with audacious and anarchic experiments in genre film form: lush romances, hyper-kinetic thrillers, mind-bending comedies. But by 1997, when the former British colony was handed over to Mainland Chinese control, many of Hong Kong's brightest stars and directors had left for Hollywood. This is a series about what happened after they left, about the filmmakers who stayed behind and how they navigated their new world in-between East and West.

"Stephen Chow unites the traditions of 1970s comedy and kung fu with modern special effects in Kung Fu Hustle while Ang Lee adapts the epic wuxias of King Hu into a stately international box office smash with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Johnnie To charts the arcane rituals of the criminal underworld, and their manipulations by a ruling elite in Election and Election 2. And Fruit Chan carves out new territory for independent cinema with Made in Hong Kong, shot on scrounged bits of leftover film scraps and released mere months after the Handover, an essential snapshot of teens trapped in a world they know is about to end, haunted by the idea of what happens next."