Hello, my name's Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Slawn.

And you are listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're tackling a big subject that, as Will said right before we started recording,

we've been preparing

our whole lives for post-handover Hong Kong cinema.

In 1997, the colony of Hong Kong was returned by colonial Britain to mainland China.

Now, this handover, which was announced in 1984, caused a great deal of concern among the city's

artists and filmmakers. What would the notoriously repressive Chinese regime do for freedom

in the arts? Also, how do you take this very advanced, globalized city and join it with a largely agrarian economy

that is the mainland? You know, what would this even look like? And 1997 is when the handover

happened. And it's also, I think, for folks like us, you know, fans of Hong Kong cinema,

basically the end of Hong Kong being a really exciting national cinema, if you will. I wouldn't go that far because

people like Johnny Toe made their career post handover, but it is, you know, the death of a thousand

cuts. Now, I'm not here just to badmouth the People's Republic,

because it's not all their fault, although... Yeah. Oh, what's that in the news? Oh, oh boy.

Yeah. I mean, Hong Kong's ongoing existence as a film industry, for a variety of reasons,

basically it owes its existence to the mainland at this point,

and we can get into all the reasons why Hong Kong declined as a film industry.

But in recent years, the mainland has essentially swallowed up Hong Kong's film industry.

It's swallowed up all of the key players from the Golden Age.

It's been hard to watch. It's been depressing to watch.

But I mean, I think we're also interested in this subject because since 1997, many interesting

...