LETTER FROM HONGKONG

The walled city of Kowloon, a lawless enclave in the middle of Hong Kong's New Territories, now destroyed, has always held a special place in Hong Kong's collective memory. This mythical place, with all the values it embodies in hindsight, seems to play the starring role in director Soi Cheang's new martial arts film, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, which has been greeted with immense enthusiasm by Hong Kong audiences.

On the day of its release, May 1, the film set a record for box office sales for a local production. At the Cannes Film Festival, Twilight of the Warriors, shown in the Midnight Screenings section, received several minutes of applause, the first time this had happened to a film from Hong Kong.

Twilight of the Warriors certainly has the flavor of a tried-and-true recipe with no surprising ingredients: It's about courage, broken destinies, loyalty, betrayal, the end of an era, and, of course, debts – of money, blood and honor. And in keeping with the expectations of the genre, the screenplay is punctuated by combat scenes so spectacular you almost forget how violent they are.

But it's more for what this city symbolizes that the film has struck a chord with Hongkongers in 2024, stifled and gagged in recent years by new laws that have considerably limited their freedoms.

The walled city, nicknamed the City of Darkness, was certainly dilapidated and unsanitary but it is also revealed to be humane and supportive. In this jungle-like atmosphere, there was an insolent freedom where anything seemed possible, a freedom that Hong Kongers now look back on with nostalgia.

"The film has a special resonance not only because it allows audiences to relive Hong Kong's past in the golden age of the 1980s, but also because it comes at a time when the city is once again at a crossroads, reshaping its identity amid seismic political and social upheavals," the South China Morning Post opined in its editorial of May 29.

"During filming and research, I realized that the walled city was somewhat similar to the situation in Hong Kong. I chose to set the film in 1984 [the year in which the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, laying the foundations for the transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997] for a specific reason. At the time, everyone was asking themselves 'Who am I? Am I British or Chinese?'" Soi Cheang told online magazine Zolima City Mag.

Although it owes its walled-in status to a past as complex as its architecture, the famous city, repeatedly evacuated and then reoccupied, had been built without a plan, without foundations, without any real sewage system. Until its destruction in 1993, it occupied a block of houses less than three hectares in size and was then considered the densest district in the world.

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