West Estate (2020)
Overview
West Estate spotlights the severe housing problems in Hong Kong, taking the spirit of resistance outside of the protest. The damaged walls in the cage-like tenements reflect the many forms of social injustice as well as Hongkongers’ widespread sense of rootlessness. Connecting three stories from different households like puzzle pieces, the film depicts people’s despair over issues of family, sexuality, love, and freedom.
Production Companies
Additional Info
Budget | $0.00 |
---|---|
Revenue | $0.00 |
Original Language | cn |
Popularity | 0.296 |
Directed By
Kin Hung Alvin Low
Crew
Kin Hung Alvin Low
TOP CAST
Similar Movies
Hong Kong Fooey
HongAFI nominated director, Charlie Hill-Smith’s first documentary, is a telling insight into the complexities that face modern China. In 1997 the most free market city of earth was consumed by the last great communist state, but who is China? What is China? Travel from Hong Kong to Beijing to Tibet to grab a warts and all snap shot of the Middle Kingdom as it rises to become the great power of the twenty first century.
A Savage Christmas: The Fall of Hong Kong
The documentary, using the dramatization of fact, makes the case that the Canadian government knowingly sent two unprepared infantry battalions to help defend Hong Kong in late 1941, fully aware that they may have been on a doomed mission. The C Force, consisting of about 2000 soldiers from the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada (from Quebec City) were, with the other British, Indian and Hong Kong troops, attacked on December 8, 1941 and overwhelmed by Japanese troops, leading to numerous casualties and the surrender on Christmas day. The Canadians would spend more than 3 and half years as prisoners of war, in horrible conditions. Part of "The Valour and the Horror" mini series.
The Inspired Island: My City
Poet and author Xi Xi is one of Hong Kong's most treasured writers. Though also acclaimed in Taiwan and mainland China for seminal works like the essay Shops, her writings are firmly rooted in the spirit of Hong Kong. Leave it to Fruit Chan, another staunchly grassroots auteur, to make a documentary on Xi Xi's career. Chan sought out renowned critics and writers to discuss Xi Xi's works, starting with 1979's My City. He also juxtaposes photos of a changing Hong Kong with readings of her writings, and even playfully inserts characters from her stories into the film.
Cinema Hong Kong: The Beauties of the Shaw Studio
Hong Kong cinemas had a wide range of glamorous female stars during the golden age of the 60's and 70's. The series will take the audience on a sentimental journey to the good old days and once again look at the expansive epic costume dramas and huangmei operas in which actresses played both the male and female roles. Rare interviews with Sir Run Run Shaw, stars Ivy Ling Po, Shaw Yin Yin, Tanny Tie Ni and Cheng Pei Pei are also featured.
Heromakers
Experience an action-packed, stunt-filled journey behind the scenes of the World-famous 'Hong Kong Action Cinema industry'. Join Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and the leading members of the 'Hong Kong Stuntman Association' as they reveal the secrets of their trade, and disclose fascinating anecdotes relating to their groundbreaking work in some of the most daring and innovative action movies ever made.
Heart Murmurs
Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.
Farewell Oak Street
This documentary presents a before-and-after picture of people in a large-scale public housing project in Toronto. Due to a housing shortage, they were forced to live in squalid, dingy flats and ramshackle dwellings on a crowded street in Regent Park North; now they have access to new, modern housing developments designed to offer them privacy, light and space.
Kwai Shing West Estate
A homage to the social housing architecture that is so atypical of Hong Kong - especially the Kwai Shing West Estate. About half of the population lives in such building complexes, where one experiences a strong sense of loneliness. The neighborhoods are the scene of modern living conditions, but also of social protests, which have been punishable by life imprisonment in Hong Kong since 2020 due to a new law.
The Downtown Project
Just a stone’s throw from downtown Montreal is the largest social housing complex in Quebec. Built in 1959 where the red-light district used to be, Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance have retained something of the area’s seedy reputation for poverty, prostitution, drugs and violence. But who really knows the projects and the people who live there? Delving beneath the prejudices and stereotypes, director Isabelle Longtin ventured inside the buildings and met the residents.
Golden Surge
Hong Kong is facing tyranny, and a pair of brothers are marching on their own ways in the revolution. However, the horror is approaching, and it’s like this city knows everything, it reborns after it collapses. There seems to be a huge energy behind this, asking inwardly: What is the fight for?
The Lovers and the Despot
Hong Kong, 1978. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee is kidnapped by North Korean operatives following orders from dictator Kim Jong-il.
Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises
The motions and gestures of military riot police, slowed down while performed by dancers, are surprisingly beautiful. Menace and violence estranged from context and time looks eerily strange, and all too familiar. In this gallery piece, Isaac Chong Wai somehow anticipates, a year early, key images of the Hong Kong protests.
Fishball Revolution
An asylum seeker from Hong Kong builds a new life for himself in Glasgow, using his passion for street food to maintain his cultural identity.
The People of the Kattawapiskak River
Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary The People of the Kattawapiskak River exposes the housing crisis faced by 1,700 Cree in Northern Ontario, a situation that led Attawapiskat’s band chief, Theresa Spence, to ask the Canadian Red Cross for help. With the Idle No More movement making front page headlines, this film provides background and context for one aspect of the growing crisis.
Lai Man-wai: Father of Hong Kong Cinema
In the life of Mr. Lai Man-wai, he had seen the most turbulent times of recent Chinese history. From the fall of the Qing Dynasty to the founding of the Republic, from the Sino-Japanese War to the founding of the People’s Republic. With a patriotic spirit, he joined the revolution and used the theatre to promote the revolutionary course. For a ‘stronger China’, and ‘education for all’, he chose film as his life long goal and career. Lai was more than the father of Hong Kong cinema was; he was also one of the pioneers of the Chinese cinema. He made Hong Kong’s first short fiction film ‘Zhuangzi Tests His Wife’. He opened the first Chinese owned cinema, the New World Cinema, in Hong Kong…. In the several decades, Lai had devoted his life and fortune in writing this glorious inaugural chapter in early Chinese film history. The technical enhancement, the introduction of foreign techniques and equipment were all part of his contribution to the Chinese cinema.
YAYA
YAYA is a story about a filmmaker who explores the complex relationship between his family and the domestic worker who spent decades away from her family in the Philippines to raise his. This documentary is a tribute to all the domestic workers in Hong Kong, who has served as the backbone of Hong Kong's economy by unleashing a substantial female workforce into the economy and taken care of so many lives with love and care. You are all heroes in the hearts of the Hong Kong people. - Justin Cheung, the director
Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony
Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.
Fear(less) and Dear
Hongkongers have been experiencing extremely difficult times due to the political movement caused by anti-Extradition Bill since the summer of 2019 followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This film explores Hongkongers’ fear in various dimensions, be it a concept or actual physical experience, personal or political, private or public, or the mixing of these pairs.
Cinema Strada
Having devoted much of his career to programming and film history research, Law Kar, a.k.a. Uncle Kar, places himself before the camera for the first time. This nostalgic trip down memory lane, as he recounts his personal and cinematic experiences, from film criticism, experimental filmmaking to auditioning for Federico Fellini, cumulates in a brief history of Hong Kong cinema itself. Reflecting on the past 80 years, Law Kar's affectionate documentary sheds light on local movies and Chinese cinema, brooding over the socio-political transformation of our perplexed city, as the restless cinephile ponders the role cinema and art play in times of crisis.