Local heroes

The Hong Kong film industry has seen a string of hits in the recent past and there may be more in the pipeline. Amy Mullins lists the ones to watch out for in the next few months.

Hong Kong's film renaissance seems to be in full swing.

At the end of October, three local films cracked the top 10 among earners at the Hong Kong box office: My Heavenly City, starring perpetual favorite Keung To of the local boy band Mirror; horror film It Remains, thanks to the proximity of Halloween and another Mirror member, Anson Lo; and music film Band Four, with Cantopop favorites Kay Tse and Teddy Robin. On top of that, unofficial numbers for the first weekend of November had Lawrence Kan's In Broad Daylight scoring a place in the top five.

Jack Ng's A Guilty Conscience famously kicked off 2023 with a record-breaking box-office haul, and as of now it is Hong Kong's all-time champ, handily besting Ng Yuen-fai's previous champ Warriors of Future (2022), with takings of over HK$110 million ($14.09 million). One of 2022's biggest hits, Sunny Chan's holiday comedy-drama Table For Six, gets a sequel this coming Lunar New Year.

At this past March's Filmart, Ng told delegates that there needed to be at least two or three years of sustained activity and success for the industry to see a real renaissance, but it's easy to see why movie-goers and filmmakers are excited. It's possible that 2024 will mark the third year of big box-office collections - 2021's Anita pulled in over HK$60 million - especially if the critical success and positive festival-audience response to a string of diverse local productions on the horizon translate into ticket sales.

The first test will be Time Still Turns the Pages, first-time filmmaker Nick Cheuk's painfully honest depiction of Hong Kong parents pushing their children to the extreme in the hope of securing their future and the trauma suffered as a result.

Lo Chun-yip (Suk Suk) plays Mr Cheng, a high school teacher still reeling from the suicide of his brother years before, when he was in elementary school. Funded by Hong Kong's hottest producer - the Arts Development Council's First Feature Film Initiative (FFFI) - the film is an unwashed portrait of Cheng haunted by past trauma, and how one man's personal tragedy can have a far-reaching impact. As Cheng's parents, Rosa Maria Velasco and Ronald Cheng have the unenviable task of humanizing characters that could easily be monsters, and both manage to make it clear that they feel trapped in their own ways, and also terrified of leaving behind children who are ill-equipped to deal with today's world.