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

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we return to Hong Kong to talk about director Soy Chang.

1997 is commonly understood, I think, as a demarcation line in the history of Hong Kong cinema.

I mean, some people could say that, considering that's when the handover to mainland China happened.

That's right. And, you know, maybe the industry had been petering out a little bit before that, too, because of a variety of factors from rampant piracy to intense competition from American

blockbusters to an aging talent pool. But really in the late 90s, you see some of the wind

come out of the sails. Yeah, that's the metaphor I was looking for, or the air out of the balloon or what

have you. Like Jackie's, you know, coming to america that's where his fortunes lie and

the movies will be just as good as they were back in hong kong and i'm often struck by when you look

at hong action movies from the 80s there's this incredible energy even in like the ones that aren't

all that great you just feel this sounds like base like quality you will see in all of them. Yeah, and there was just this, there was just this spirit that was happening, you know, on this island that was gone by the turn of the millennium.

But there have been a few filmmakers since then who have forged a different kind of path.

They've harnessed a different sort of energy.

Johnny Toe, obviously, the most celebrated one,

who had a much more cool temperature-wise kind of action movie.

And then there's Soy Chang, where his movies,

I think the best way to describe them are violent and more often than not tragic.

Yeah, he's somebody who has used Hong Kong as a landscape or as his canvas. God,

I'm really mixing up all my metaphors today. His Hong Kong is captured between past and present.

It's a Hong Kong where the shiny surface of modern day capitalism is plastered inelegantly over

mounds and mounds and mounds of garbage.

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