Ye xiang, yuan yang, shen shui bu

Four stories (three fictional, one documentary) show how fiction and fact, humour and drama, the personal and political are complementary facets of the same ever-fascinating, complex, challenging realities that constitute Hong Kong. An intrepid domestic worker from Indonesia wisely guides her aging but energetic elderly charge on a deceptively circuitous outing. In a nostalgia-purveying toyshop, two twenty-something brothers retrieve fragmented memories of their youth. Two young professional teachers – a savvy local man, and a foreign woman fascinated by Hong Kong food delights – immerse themselves in a shared discovery of HK culture. A politically engaged barista-cum-actress decides to run in the hotly contested 2019 elections. Leung Ming-kai and Kate Reilly's ambitious structural gambit results in a work that delights and gently provokes. With deceptive lightness and elegance, their film plumbs the tensions and contradictions that underlie and activate Hong Kong's predicament today. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)