Letter from Hong Kong
A lawless enclave in the heart of Hong Kong's New Territories, the walled city of Kowloon, though now destroyed, has always held a special place in the memory of Hong Kong people. This mystical place, with all the values it embodied, seems in retrospect to play a starring role in director Soi Cheung's new martial arts film, Kowloon Walled City. Twilight of the Warriors: Surrounded by WallsThe performance was met with great enthusiasm by the Hong Kong audience.
On its release day, May 1, the film set a box office record for a domestic film. At the Cannes Film Festival, Twilight of the WarriorsScreened at a late-night screening, “The Great Passage” was met with several minutes of standing ovation, a first for a Hong Kong film.
Twilight of the Warriors It certainly has the flavor of a tried-and-true recipe, without any surprising ingredients: it's about courage, broken destinies, loyalty, betrayal, the end of an era, and, of course, debts of money, blood and honor. And, in keeping with genre expectations, the script is punctuated with fight scenes so spectacular that you forget how violent they are.
But it is what the city represents that makes the film resonate with the people of Hong Kong in 2024, a city whose freedoms have been severely restricted and oppressed in recent years through new laws.
Nicknamed the “Dark Castle,” the walled city was indeed dilapidated and unsanitary, but it also emerged as a humane and supportive place, and in its jungle-like atmosphere there was an arrogant freedom in which anything seemed possible — a freedom that Hong Kongers now look back on fondly.
“The Golden Age of the 1980s”
“The film not only allows audiences to relive Hong Kong's past during its golden age of the 1980s, but also holds special resonance as it is being released at a time when Hong Kong is once again at a crossroads, reshaping its identity amid political and social upheaval,” the director said. South China Morning Post The editorial said this on May 29th.
“During the filming and research process, I realised that the walled city was similar to the situation in Hong Kong, so I set the film in 1984. [the year in which the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, laying the foundations for the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997] “There was a special reason. At that time everyone was asking themselves: 'Who am I? Am I British or Chinese?'” Soi Chan told online magazine Zorima City Mag.
Its status as a walled city owes as much to its complicated past as to its architecture, but the famous city, which was repeatedly evacuated and reoccupied, was built without plans, foundations or a proper sewerage system. Until its destruction in 1993, it covered an area of less than three hectares of residential land and was considered at the time the most densely populated area in the world.
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