[Fieldwork Podcast]: Made in Hong Kong (1997)

A: Good morning or evening, wherever you are; welcome to our podcast on architecture and film. We are your hosts today. I am Audrey.

T: And I am Toisa. The film we will discuss today is ‘Made in Hong Kong,’ which shows the tragic stories of three marginalized teenagers in Lek Yuen Estate, Shatin. It was the first independent film made by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan and was released on October 9, 1997.

A: The characters of “Made in Hong Kong” are simple: a street punk named Moon, a young girl named Ping who has kidney cancer, and a dumb boy named Long who is constantly bullied by others. Their destiny is linked by a suicide note of a young girl who leaped off a building and eventually alluded to the common topic of film —”death.”

T: Although the concept of “Death” is weighty and melancholy, the film’s tone is not gloomy, and most of the outdoor shots are day scenes. Most of the daytime scenes are filled with brightness and heated air, as though the youngsters’ hormones rush through their bodies. Although in the bright, pleasant daytime, the opening shot begins with a scenery shot of the barbed wire fence outside the stadium. It then shifts horizontally to the boys fighting on the basketball court and Moon behind the wire fences. As the movie’s storyline unfolds, the viewer’s vision is constantly blocked by various barriers, from the barbed wire fence outside the stadium to the door guardrail of homes in residential buildings. Do you think the grids and fences are symbolic in the film?

A: Yes, the wire fences represented the constant confinement of the protagonists from society. In reality, fences are perceived as obstacles that block vision. When facing fences, people usually avoid them and seek alternative routes. But in the camera language of Fruit Chan, the characters often clung closely to them, and the scenes were shot through the fences with the protagonists behind. This shows the deep desire of Moon, Ping, and Long to catch up with the pace of society and blend in, which nevertheless became a far-fetched and unachievable dream.

T: The architecture of Shun Lee Estate, where Ping lived, also played a role in the movie. The building strictly follows a geometric composition. Containing a squared-spiral ring structure that extends up to 30 floors upward, with 16 households per floor, its prison style of architecture allows only inspection from the middle, with little horizontal visibility of residents, further limited by small windows.

A: Indeed, I also noticed that other than the Shun Lee Estate, public housing estates such as Lek Yuen Estate is where all the important stories in the film take place. Lek Yuen Estate is a calm and unruffled place, filled mostly by elderly residents and people from the lower to the middle class. At the same time, however, there is also a sense of liveliness in the community created by the surrounding buildings and infrastructures, including a Kindergarten, elementary school, supermarket, and library. In the movie, Fruit Chan exaggerated the sense of confinement of the architecture through unique shooting angles across the building’s dark and hollow interior hallway with a faint yellow and bluish tone of coloration.

T: The camera portrays a scene where people live in a trapped and imprisoned place. Other than that, the square right-angle structure of public housing was given many close-ups. Whether it was either a low-angle shot or a high-angle shot, that building always looked like a vast square cage. Why do you think Fruit Chan intentionally selected the public housing estate as a setting for the film? In other words, what does this architecture offer to the film?

A: Firstly, public housing is the home of the lowest-class people like Moon and Ping. People living there include the elderly, the underprivileged, and new immigrants from the mainland. The dismal living condition of public housing is a sign of the government’s long-standing negligence of the economic and living situation of the marginalized people, which leads to gross inequality in Hong Kong society. In addition, during the boom of Hong Kong’s real estate market during the late 1970s, many of the inhabitants of public housing had been lured into home ownership, resulting in the public housing being a haunted and forsaken place. As a result, it unavoidably expresses the melancholy and loss of its residents. Moon’s parents left him alone in public housing. Ping suffers from kidney disease in public housing and will not live long. They struggle to break free, but they both end up dying. I think you are right in that the housing in the film is a metaphor for a cage that has imprisoned generations of Hong Kong’s marginalized people, ranging from young teenagers to adults. The public housing in Fruit Chen films is a microcosm of Hong Kong society in Fruit Chan’s time, where people are trapped but cannot escape and have to cling to it because it is a fundamental part of their survival. On the one hand, Hong Kong’s public housing implies the historical and cultural experience of the British colonization period, during which the government’s housing policy focused more on economic factors other than humanitarian factors. This brings the film’s meaning to the national level; on the other hand, public housing presents itself as an empty and decaying form, a desert and ruin in the city, with profound narrative significance.

T: Thanks for the explanation; you make much sense. I also found that the public bathroom appeared many times in the movie. The restroom was originally just a citizen used for emergency excretion, but the director filmed many plots here. Long was insulted and bullied by the students in the public restroom. The boy tried to cut off the hands of his rapist dad here, and also Rong Shao instructed Moon to get a pistol in the police station toilet.

A: Yes, I agree with you. This is director Fruit Chan’s intentional narrative through a heterogeneous space. A restroom in Fruit Chan’s film is a space that has been alienated. The dangers lurking behind its seemingly orderly area make it extremely unsafe. Fruit Chen used public restrooms to suggest that, at that time, no matter how much we value life, it will eventually end up in a place like a public toilet, like dirt. The public restrooms in Fruit Chen’s films are mysterious and full of unknowns, filtered with a cold and bluish tone. The Hong Kong society at that time shared similarities with the public toilet depicted in the film, which is full of ubiquitous differences and contradictions.

T: Exactly. Talking about the ending of life, I also found out how Fruit Chan uses the cemetery. One movie plot shows Ping, Long, and Moon bringing Susan’s suicide note to find her in the Wo Hop Shek cemetery.

A: I agree. What do you think is filmic about this space?

T: The cemetery in real life is supposed to be full of sadness and the calm and gloomy atmosphere of death. While in the movie, the protagonists run around the graveyard happily and shout Susan’s name. The cemetery is more like a relaxing and carefree place for them. Director Fruit Chen has uniquely reversed the reality of the cemetery’s function. His shot of the protagonist includes a bright beam of sunlight from the upper left corner, which shines on the teenagers as they walk through the cemetery. The sunshine is vibrant, but the sky is still pale, echoing the sense of death in space. Under his lens, the world of the dead is peaceful and quiet, while the real living world is only composed of misery and despair; the cemetery becomes a place that makes them liberate themselves from their youthful sorrow.

A: “I tried my best to use those housing estates unique to Hong Kong to highlight its image — this uniqueness is the whole spirit of Made in Hong Kong.” This is how Fruit Chan explained his usage of architecture.

T: And it is very true, in Made in Hong Kong, Fruit Chan leaves all the shots to the underclass people of Hong Kong. Through the shooting of fences, public housing, public toilets, and the cemetery, he showed audiences the state of existence outside the prosperous economic development and urban civilization of Hong Kong. In addition, he also expressed the ideology and survival rules of Hong Kong’s marginalized people in the unique history and cultural atmosphere of Hong Kong. By analyzing the architectural space in his film, we can observe the inner world of the protagonists and examine their living area, learning about the powerlessness and despair of the youth in Hong Kong at that age.

Group members:

Name: LI Jiatong (Tosia)

Uid: 3036097554

Name: Sun Haofu (Audrey)

Uid: 3035977410