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ABSTRACT
Hong Kong cinema is an emerging component of the booming Chinese film industry twenty years after the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to China. Hong Kong filmmakers and film companies now routinely collaborate with the mainland industry to produce for the mainland audience, prompting many creative artists and companies of the Hong Kong industry to relocate to the mainland. Based on the fundamental idea that both mainland Chinese cinema and Hong Kong cinema are constantly reshaping as a result of inter- and trans-cultural exchanges, this article adopts a bottom-up approach to re-examine the top-down-managed cultural nationalisation of Hong Kong cinema. Hong Kong (co-)produced films are increasingly devoid of local sensibilities and identities. Film companies and talents of the Hong Kong film industry, at least in the mainstream sector, are gradually incorporated into the film industry in the mainland. Notwithstanding these overwhelming tendencies, I suggest that Hong Kong cinema’s legacies exist beyond narrative strategies and genre approaches, and have started to show in film companies’ role in, and their capability of, challenging and reshaping the future of the Chinese screenscape. Specifically, through the examination of a series of film projects from Milkyway Image, a Hong Kong-based film production company, this article shows that Hong Kong cinema’s renationalisation is a process of simultaneous cooperation, negotiation, and resistance.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Prof. Julian Stringer, Prof. Mark Gallagher, Dr. Gary Bettinson, Prof. Gianluca Sergi, the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies for their critical reading and valuable comments on the manuscript.
Notes on contributor
Sun Yi holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies and currently teaches in the College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang University. Her research interests include film industry practices, genre studies, Chinese-language cinema and especially Hong Kong cinema. She has published in journals such as Asian Cinema and Transnational Cinemas.
Notes
1 Rankings in this article are among domestic films.
2 According to the HKMPIA (Citation2009), “From 2009 onwards, films considered as Hong Kong Movie by the MPIA must comply with the following requirements stated in (a) or (b): (a) All the presenting companies involved in film production must be registered companies in Hong Kong (For partly companies registered outside Hong Kong, please refer to part (b). (b) For partly presenting companies registered outside Hong Kong, both requirements must be fulfilled: 1. at least one of the presenting companies is registered in Hong Kong; and 2. Hong Kong permanent residents should take up at least 50% or above of the listed effective post. The effective posts are film, producer, director, script writer, actor or actress. […] For movie without script writer, either the film producer or the director must be Hong Kong permanent citizen. Under usual circumstance where there are five effective posts, at least three positions must be taken by Hong Kong permanent residents.”
3 The translation is my own.
4 Milkyway is not the only Hong Kong film production company that have undergone a process of mainlandisation. Other companies include, for example, Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop (Once Upon a Time in China [1991]; Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame [2010]; Flying Swords of Dragon Gate [2011]), Peter Chan’s We Pictures (Bodyguards and Assassins [2009]; Dragon [2011]; American Dreams in China [2013]), and Pang Ho-Cheung’s Making Film Productions (Love in a Puff [2010]; Love in the Buff [2012]; Love off the Cuff [2017]).