Alvin Tsang

During his studies in Edinburgh in 2021, filmmaker Fredie Chan experienced a protest by the locals to fight for their housing rights, as developers are discovered to be converting empty lots and unused old buildings into new international students flats, rather than resolving severe housing shortage for the locals. From the perspective of a Hongkonger, who is no stranger to housing problems, the documentary follows a group of local grassroots housing advocates, attempting to investigate the crisis, connecting the dots between global and local. Screened with the director’s previous film Beautiful Life, about an Indonesian girl who left her homeland to work as a domestic helper for a financially unstable grassroot family in Hong Kong.

Filmed over a 17 year period, director Alvin Tsang reflects on his family’s migration from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s—fraught with betrayal from his parents’ divorce, economic strife and a communication meltdown.