Awards and festivals

Film description

In the 1960s, Chun Man, a high school student from the Sha Tau Kok district on the border between China and Hong Kong, often engages in protests against colonial British authorities. His teachers support Mao Zedong, hoping the Cultural Revolution will reach Hong Kong, freeing its people from the failing colonial rule. One day, Chun Man meets a young refugee from China whom the Revolution prevented from finding a job and supporting his family. He wants to find work in Hong Kong and send money to his mother. Ideology will always remain in conflict with daily life, and yet history keeps repeating itself.

Derek Chiu reveals a fairly unknown period in the history of his home town, the events he vaguely remembers from his childhood. The riots of 1967 drastically changed the British government's approach to its rule over Hong Kong. In the 1970s the slums were turned into new apartment buildings, the economic miracle in the region created more jobs, and the middle class grew stronger, creating its own image of Hong Kong, now familiar to international audiences. Derek Chiu based his film on parallel, yet temporary distant narrative threads, pondering over the past and the future of the city.

Maja Korbecka