Made in Hong Kong (4K Restored Version) 香港製造 (4K 修復版)
Hong Kong / 1997 / Colour / 108 min
In Cantonese with English subtitles
Dir. Fruit CHAN
2022 / 03 / 25 (Fri) - 8:50 PM
Genesis Cinema, London
Moon is a small-time thug who dropped out of school (“I wasn’t any good at studying, but the system’s no better than I am”) and lives on the pay of a local mobster. Doomed, yet naively in search of a way out, he spends his pointless, violent life with Sylvester, his mentally retarded friend, and one day he falls in love with Ping, a girl with a terminal illness. And that’s all it takes to trigger the perfect storm... Made in Hong Kong is an incredible film - a powerful distillation of urban alienation and youthful despair shot on a shoestring and with a truly impressive freshness. Released shortly after the handover that returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, Fruit Chan’s masterpiece communicates perfectly the artistic fervour and the social climate of the city. A time of new beginnings and opportunities for the cinema of the former British colony which, after the splendours of Bruce Lee, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai, was forced to seek rebirth. Poised between realism and narrative, between the rawness and the poetry of the cinema of the street, for twenty years Made in Hong Kong has been invisible and impossible to find, and is now given new life thanks to the restored version released by the Far East Film Festival.
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Fruit Chan (1959) was born in Hong Kong. After entering the cinema industry as an assistant director in the early eighties, he directed his first feature film, Finale in Blood, in 1993 and became a cause célèbre with the low-budget Made in Hong Kong (1997). Subsequently he received critical and public acclaim for films like The Longest Summer (1998), Durian, Durian (2000), Hollywood Hong Kong (2002) and Dumplings: Three… Extremes (2004). In recent years he has been active as a producer and director of short films and directed the popular science-fiction film The Midnight After (2014, shown the same year at the FEFF).
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Golden Montgolfiere — Nantes Three Continents Festival 1997
Young Audience Award — Nantes Three Continents Festival 1997
Best Screenplay — Gijón International Film Festival 1997
Grand Prix Asturias — Gijón International Film Festival 1997
Best Picture — Golden Bauhinia Awards 1998
Best Director — Golden Bauhinia Awards 1998
Best Director — Golden Horse Film Festival 1997
Best Original Screenplay — Golden Horse Film Festival 1997
Golden Montgolfiere — Locarno International Film Festival 1997
FIPRESCI Prize — Pusan International Film Festival 1997
