Fruit Chan - Xianggang zhizao AKA Made in Hong Kong (1997)

From Sight and Sound (August 1999)

The production history of Made in Hong Kong has attracted as much attention as the film itself. Fruit Chan, a long-serving assistant director in the Hong Kong film industry who had directed one commercial quickie in 1991, began planning it in 1994 and started saving short-ends from films he worked on. He shot it over two months at the end of 1996 on a borrowed budget of around US$80,000, using a crew of five and a cast of non-professionals. The movie-star/singer Andy Lau (the sailor in Days of Being Wild) provided a production office and other material support; the post-production was assisted by director/distributor Shu Kei. The finished film was rejected by the Hong Kong Film Festival in April 1997, but went on to triumph on the international festival circuit. Both Chan and lead actor Sam Lee are now much in demand in what remains of the film industry.

In short, Chan's film was the first Hong Kong feature which could be called an 'indie' in the sense that the Sundance Festival once meant it, but the film is smart and accomplished enough to deserve better than to be treated as an enterprising novelty. Chan's background in the industry inflects it at every level. It's at once an insider's attempt to unlearn some bad industry habits, a professional's bid to beat commercial rivals at their own game, and an outsider's criticism of the ways the industry has glamorised the current generation of juvenile delinquents. Another independent director coming to this project without Chan's history behind him certainly would have made a very different film.
Tony Rayns





From sensesofcinema.com

Shot as a low budget feature using odd length, reclaimed scrap film stock and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, Made in Hong Kong is a stylistically bold, intelligently conceived, and compassionate portrait of aimlessness and disconnection. Chan's audacious and resourceful camerawork exploits the natural, frenetic rhythm of city life to create an atmosphere of disorientation and insignificance that, in turn, reflects the nihilism and despair of the young, disaffected protagonists. In a lighthearted and subtly affecting scene that occurs midway through the film, the three friends discover a picturesque viewing location from atop a vast hillside cemetery and begin to casually search for Susan's grave among the countless tombstones. It is a liberating episode that is repeated at the end of the film—a fleeting moment that encapsulates the irreconcilable paradox of their existence—the passionate, unanswered cries of lost youth in search of identity and validation amidst the alienating silence of an apathetic and inutile society rooted in human commodification, marginalization, and disposability.
Acquarello




http://rapidshare.com/files/263066937/_Asian__Made_In_Hong_Kong.part1.rar
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Language: Cantonese (English & Italian softsubs)
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