(re)imagining Hong Kong urban cinema

(re)imagining Hong Kong urban cinema

The dialogue between city and cinema, especially those shot on location, starts from the latter’s ability to document the urban environment in the past. But what cinema can offer is more than the materiality of the city; its predilection for storytelling and sightseeing also provokes its depiction of everyday practices, complex social relations and contradictions. In this way, cinema has become a form of “modern cartography” (Bruno, 2002) and a “container of human and emotional drama” (Penz and Koeck, 2017) which gleans, portrays and exposes the untold stories of everyday urban space. In Hong Kong, filmmakers have sought to take cinema as a form for the exploration of cultural identity and the revealing of urban discourses since the 1980s, seeing the underprivileged and marginalised groups of people as the protagonist of the city rather than the drab background.

As an interdisciplinary research project, “Location, Imagination and Transformation” foregrounds the affinity between Hong Kong and its urban cinema, as well as the role of local communities in city making. It investigates filmic depictions of socio-spatial practices by the grassroots in the region, to conduct a topographical study of the locations of these practices, which leave no mark on the official city map and yet are important sites for individuals and communities.

This project is funded by Design Trust Hong Kong Seed Grant.