What Hong Kong Cinema Is Building After the Silence
A new generation of filmmakers is finding ways to tell Hong Kong stories — just not always in Hong Kong.
The golden age of Hong Kong cinema is one of the most documented creative explosions in film history. The 1980s and 1990s produced an extraordinary volume of extraordinary work — John Woo’s balletic violence, Wong Kar-wai’s temporal melancholy, Johnnie To’s genre precision — that influenced filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Park Chan-wook and beyond.
Then the handover happened, and then the National Security Law happened, and then the silence happened.
Where the Films Are Being Made
The first thing to understand about the new Hong Kong cinema is that some of it is not being made in Hong Kong. A cohort of filmmakers have relocated — to Taiwan, to the UK, to Canada — and are making films that are Hong Kong in sensibility, in language, in cultural reference, even when they are not Hong Kong in production.
This diaspora cinema is producing genuinely remarkable work. Directors like Kiwi Chow, whose documentary Revolution of Our Times was completed in secret and premiered at Cannes, have established a model for how Hong Kong stories can be told from outside Hong Kong’s physical and legal boundaries.
What’s Happening Inside
The picture inside Hong Kong is more ambiguous. The films being made within the territory operate under constraints that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. And yet — the instinct to find ways around constraints is also a creative instinct, and some filmmakers are exercising it with considerable ingenuity. Genre — specifically horror and thriller — has emerged as a vehicle for stories that would be difficult to tell directly.
The Streaming Factor
One thing that has changed the calculus is streaming. Hong Kong films no longer need Hong Kong cinemas to reach an audience. The distribution bottleneck has been partially dissolved.
What is clear is that the desire to make Hong Kong stories — in Hong Kong or from wherever Hong Kong people now live — remains powerful. The cinema that emerges from that desire will tell us something important about what survives when everything else changes.