Writing
She is a teacher of Chinese literature, reciting poems and recounting the brilliance of ancient Chinese poets before a class of students whose common parlance is foul language. He is a hormone-charged teenager who makes a paper plane for the teacher from a torn textbook page doodled with drawings of the object of his fantasy. She is a divorcee whose husband was rumoured to have an affair with a student in his school. With partly fascination and partly curiosity, he starts making suggestive remarks in class and stalking her outside the school, rattling her with flirtation. Both carrying a heavy load of baggage, the teacher and her student are about to ignite a spark that will scorch them both.
Hung, a 40-year-old security guard of a commercial building, lives in a cramped sub-divided flat with his wife, Ping, a part-time waitress in a Cha Chaan Teng, and son, Pak Yin. Amidst all the struggles for affordable accommodation, Hung never succumbs and hopes they will eventually move into a public housing unit. Yet, the lives of three get even rougher when Ping finds herself pregnant while they are being forced to leave but unable to find a new flat. Meanwhile, Pak Yin chooses to endure silently for the sake of his parents. Trapped in such a vicious cycle, are love and companionship the way to resolve?
Although 15-year old Wing is bounced around in foster homes, he forms a genuine sibling relationship with 9-year old Hoi Lam and the mentally challenged Chi Yan. They are cared for by Chi Yan's grandmother who heads up this makeshift family. Occasionally full of teen angst and bordering on delinquency, Wing nevertheless showers Hoi Lam and Chi Yan with brotherly care. Cheerful Ho Lam dreams of reunion with his mother. Wing, more world-weary, ends up transferring to a youth hostel. In their brief days together, the trio formed a true family bonded by love instead of blood. The immensely likeable and talented trio of actors shines in this poignant and heartwarming tale on how children find strength in each other.
There are people and places that we used to hold dear in our hearts and gradually became sediments of buried memories. When Charlotte encounters a suitcase at the second hand shop she works at, her emotions are unearthed and bring her back to the days of innocence with Chan. Charlotte did believe that Chan, just like the neighbourhood in bygone times, would remain constant. Yet all old things are helplessly abandoned and crushed beneath the wheel of time. At the same time, Ling is depressed and lonely because of Chan's death. Sending Chan's things away to purge her negative emotions and to set herself free from the past, a treasured relationship reveals itself like ripples of emotions.
The city is no longer the same after the year of social unrest. How do those that remain make peace with the past and move on with their lives? After Nam’s good friend Man left the city, Nam is left behind to take care of Man's mother and motor bike, while struggling to live life as normal. A strange visitation one night by her grandfather brings Nam back to her ancestral village in mainland China, where she learns about her father’s painful past. Under the silent and long poetic gaze of the camera, the survivors of two generations, representing the past and the present, the country and the city, commiserate together in a shared moment of grief and solidarity.
Timid Xiao Mu who’s often being bullied while his mother is not around because of her work. He always watches his Japanese monster movie alone, hoping that the silkworms he raises will emerge and become his favorite monster “Amola” with beautiful wings. However, Xiao Mu's expectations fail when his mother notices that what he really longs for is just pure companionship.
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Behind Mongkok’s Portland Street where French music plays in cute little artsy cafés, the back alley is a totally different world. Sister Kam washes dishes in the alley every night. She fights with the workers at the rubbish collection point and proudly boasts to the waiters how she could slaughter a pig on her own. She works till midnight and gets up at 5:30am, day after day. In the thousands of alleys in Hong Kong, stories that speak of life’ struggles wait to be told.
Seated in the front row of a funeral hall are a boy and a teenager, the picture of the deceased yet to be placed. A florist, Tung (Ai Wai), is consumed by grief but puts on a front for others. The boy drops by at the florist and orders a custom floral arrangement - a teddy bear-shaped wreath with his favourite yellow flowers — to be readied in three days' time and paid with money saved up in his piggy bank. Tung forges an unlikely friendship with his young customer, an encounter that releases bottled-up emotions so that healing process can begin.
