Defining Favourites: Made in Hong Kong (1997)

Fruit Chan's breakthrough shines a light on impoverished youth amidst the Hong Kong handover.

Photo: Metrograph Pictures

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another — akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Fruit Chan
Screenplay by Fruit Chan
Produced by Andy Lau, Doris Yang Ziming
Starring Sam Lee, Yim Hui-Chi, Wenders Li, Tam Ka-Chuen
Premiere Date: August 1997
Running Time: 108 minutes

Made in Hong Kong is one of the angriest films of the 1990s, perhaps owing to the time and place in Hong Kong’s history when it was made. By the time the film had finally released in Hong Kong, the handover has already been completed – and many of the youth living within had since been left feeling abandoned, and left to fend for themselves. So it only fits that Fruit Chan’s masterpiece is a film that captures what it feels like to be a disaffected youth trying to make it through the day, even if their means of survival involve violence. But when these young people have nowhere else to go, one can’t help but feel for them as they try to seek a better life when the adults who’ve been tasked with protecting them have left them behind.

Being the first independent film to be made in Hong Kong following the handover in 1997, Made in Hong Kong is an incisive portrait from beginning to end. It’s a portrait of what young people are yearning for in a world that can’t provide for them anymore. So it leaves young high school dropouts like Sam Lee’s Autumn Moon wandering through the streets while he works as a debt collector for a triad member, Cheung Siu-Wing. Autumn Moon looks and acts like any other teenager you would recognize off the streets. Considering Autumn’s own upbringing, Fruit Chan shows us how the fast moves towards modernizing towards capitalism would only leave people feeling alienated, hopeless, and cynical as it might seem they no longer recognize a land they once called home.