Disconnected City
At the heart of this poetic piece is a lament and an argument over the erosion of human connection and authentic romance in the modern city. Me, as the narrator observes how love, relationships, and even the physical spaces that once facilitated them are being swept away by the relentless “currents of time”, with many symbolism and imagery of “water elements”.
Sometimes I have a nostalgic yearning for a bygone era when people genuinely connected, as embodied by the telephone booths scattered around the city. However, I find these remnants of the past now abandoned and disconnected from any lingering warmth or intimacy, that’s why it inspired me to make it the subject matter. The narrative of me “searching for love” in the empty booths and trying to engage with a dog occupying one is an irony, as the humans’ disconnection has left them to be forgotten relics.
The primary setting is in Sam Shing Estate. The telephone booths, once the hubs of human interaction in this estate, now stand alone and forlorn, as you can see how damaged the telephone booth shown in the video is. I utilized our senses, to see the “buttons”, “ruins”, and to smell “metallic malodour”, etc., to serve as physical reminders of this emotional decay that has been lingering in this city for years like smoke of cigarettes. Moreover, I emphasizes the sound design, for example the seamless fading of an audio and the rhythmic dynamics, like the ticking clock at the beginning, and the footsteps counting, which emphasizes my inner monologue and also bringing out the actual data of Hong Kong’s telephone booth quantity.
Such themes of alienation and oblivion are always expressed in Hong Kong films, as things are all fleeting and vanishing amidst the bustle and rustle. So I did some research on the crumbling social fabric, which in the first scenes, there is a store closing down. And I observed and investigated the modern accessibility and normalization of Smartphones, such technological alienation that replaced intimate and authentic face-to-face connection is actually shown in Hong Kong movies as you can notice how the main communication tools switched from telephone booths to mobile phones.
So when producing the film, I designed different angles of shot, and gathered different footages of the telephone booth, but at the same time ensuring them to be consistent. I captured their close-up shots, found their connections with the surrounding environment. For example, I created an illusion of the payphone holding an “aquarium of water” by infusing it with the billboard behind.
My inspiration is to make it a creative exploration and an aesthetically pleasing art project which conveys sentimental emotions by my poetic approach. As a local student, I love studying Hong Kong’s culture and landscape, and I found joy while doing research and producing the whole film. And out of surprise, it turned out to fit in my expectation even though being my first ever self-directed film project.
Bibligraphy:
–https://www.hk01.com/社會新èž/142/電話äº-11個1ç¶“å…¸é›»å½±å ´é¢-終將é€åŽ»çš„通訊方å¼
–https://www.facebook.com/share/K8YJ9R4GVUq4fM75/?mibextid=WC7FNe
UID: 3036237831
Name: Wong Chun Fung, Derek