Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In Shanghai Blues, a 1984 screwball comedy by Hong Kong legend Tsui Hark, we don’t ever see Hong Kong, but we know that it is the destination of our two lovers departing postwar Shanghai in 1947. In a fantastic train-ride finale, Shu Shu and Tung run towards each other across crowded carriages to embark on a new life together. Hong Kong promises boundless beginnings. Its cinema is characterised by these departures and entries, by ephemerality and a melting-pot city defined by contradictions. Hawker stalls linger under skyscrapers; policemen and gangsters belong to one family; comedy and tragedy always sit side by side.From the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s, Hong Kong had one of the biggest film industries in the world, dominating the box office across east AsiaFrom the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s, Hong Kong had one of the biggest film industries in the world, dominating the box office across east Asia and surpassing almost all western countries in the number of films produced. The age is marked by multiple genres — the action films of John Woo, the stylised romanticism of Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui’s humanist dramas and Stanley Kwan’s excavations of film history. This month, Ho Tzu Nyen’s futuristic animation “Night Charades” takes over the facade of the city’s M+ museum, with a tribute to such classic Hong Kong films. The artist re-enacts familiar scenes, and then eerily estranges them through his slick AI imagery.Hong Kong cinema was also my first screen love-affair — pirated DVDs of action films filled our shelves at home. When I first saw John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), which transposes the heroism of wuxia films to the world of Hong Kong mobsters, trading swords for guns, I was struck by its tragic heart. The older generation of gangsters — middle-aged Ho (Ti Lung) and his best friend Mark (a magnetic Chow Yun-fat) — is superseded by a cold-blooded new leader, Shing (Waise Lee) who feels no qualms about abandoning their moral code. Paradoxically, the real heroism within the film is marked by a total concession of power — when Ho allows himself to be arrested by his younger cop brother Kit (a fresh-faced Leslie Cheung).Woo’s tragic action story foregrounds the destruction of the sacred bonds of gang brotherhood — and even the strongest of family ties. The film came only two years after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, which set 1997 as the handover year of the former British colony to Chinese control. Woo’s film reflects the anxiety and uncertainty lurking in the advent of a new power structure. Similarly, Stanley Kwan’s supernatural drama Rouge (1988) uses a ghost story to represent a palimpsestic history of Hong Kong. Fleur (Anita Mui), a courtesan, and wayward playboy Chan Chen-Pang (Leslie Cheung) are star-crossed lovers in 1930s Hong Kong who agree to die together in a suicide pact. However, only Fleur goes through with it. Betrayed, she returns as a ghost in the 1980s to search for her lover, wandering across an alien landscape in her qipao and perfect red lip-stain. She finds that the traditional Chinese opera centre she frequented has been replaced by a shopping arcade and a 7-Eleven. Nothing is the same now, and no one would die for love. This sense of impermanence also sits at the heart of many of my favourite light-hearted Hong Kong romcoms: An Autumn’s Tale (1987), Chungking Express (1994) and Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996). Happy endings are constantly deferred — and the audience is left dangling. In Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, Faye (Faye Wong) and Cop 663 (Tony Leung) only find each other again a year later; in Peter Chan’s Comrades, Li Xiao-Jun (Leon Lai) and Li Qiao (Maggie Cheung) serendipitously bump into each other in New York after failing to get together almost 10 years earlier in Hong Kong.Growing up in a Chinese household, love was expressed quietly, often through food — as it is in films, too. In Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale, a naive attempt by Jenny (Cherie Chung) to cook for Pang (Chow Yun-fat) is almost farcical as Pang spits out her fish soup and lovingly teaches her the correct method. When I watched the film with my mother, she sighed, “That was just like your dad.” Although Hong Kong’s golden age is now regarded almost elegiacally, following its decline after 1997 with the Asian financial crisis and Hong Kong’s handover, as well as the rise of digital piracy and new investments in the mainland film industry, its influence continues to light up our screens in unexpected ways. Just look at recent films — Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (2024) is a sensuous study of solitude amid the bustle of Mumbai, a gentle tribute to Wong Kar-wai. In Hong Kong, contemporary artists have turned to the moving-image in fruitful ways. Recent highlights include Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story (2023) which used the ghost genre to explore 20th-century industrialisation. M+ is also hosting the second edition of its Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival in May, featuring innovative moving-image works (guests include artists May Fung and Ali Wong Kit Yi).And it is rewarding to return to under-celebrated gems of the bygone era — from Allen Fong’s Ah Ying (1983), the portrait of a young woman attempting to enter Hong Kong’s new film scene, to Patrick Tam’s avant-garde pop-satire Love Massacre (1981), which is being restored by M+ as part of its programme “M+ Restored” in partnership with Chanel. Just as Hong Kong’s golden age was dedicated to the ephemeral and the unstable, perhaps we should not think of its lineage as a fixed path — just watch how Ho Tzu Nyen’s AI-created vignettes morph and abstract. Cinema needn’t be trapped by the limits of the silver screen.March 22-June 29, mplus.org.hk, artbasel.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
