Besieged City begins with scenes out of a young boy’s nightmare before going on to depict a full-blown nightmare world in which youngsters frequently feel trapped and without hope and adults, faring no better, largely add to the overall sense of despair. Indeed, even before the opening credits, viewers of this Lawrence Lau social drama – one of two (the other is Ann Hui’s The Way We Are) set in Tin Shui Wai which had their world premieres at this year’s HK International Film Festival – are shown a scene in which a suicide jumper lands on the largely transparent roof of a small structure a stoic – or is it shell-shocked? – schoolboy is standing under.

Horrifyingly, that suicide drop is just one of several unpleasant situations that litter what appears to be Ho Ling Kit’s (Tang Tak-Po) regular path to school from his unhappy home where his mother has been rendered zombie-like by prescription drugs and his father is a gambling addict glued to the horse-racing broadcast on television. What’s worse is that Ling accepts all this with the resigned look of someone for whom it is normal and isn’t likely to change for the better any time soon.

Unwilling and unable to tolerate the miserable nature of his home life and the persistent bullying at their anarchical war-zone of a school, Ling’s younger brother, Jun (Wong Yat Ho), runs away one day. Without a clear plan for a better life, he quickly ends up in a gang led by a 14-year-old girl named Panadol (Wong Hau Yun) who can act as confident and knowledgeable as much as she wants but still really doesn’t know all that much – including how to distinguish between right and wrong.

One day a policeman calls Ling out of class and tells him that his younger brother is lying unconscious in the hospital after he tried to take his own life, and that Jun stands accused of having murdered Panadol. As if that weren’t bad enough, Ling is soon after informed by threatening punks that Jun stole drugs from them, drugs they want back post haste.

Have survived thus far with an ‘It’s not my concern’ and ‘I know nothing’ attitude, Ling realizes he should have been his younger brother’s protector. Initially, for himself more than his brother, he tries to find the drugs Jun has been accused of taking. He delves into the past year of his brother’s life, discovers that the female stranger who regularly visits Jun in hospital is Panadol’s elder sister, Yee Wah (Joman Chiang), and unearths a tragic tale of wrongs upon terrible wrongs.

An emotionally intense film chock-full of unsavoury situations, horrible events and amoral – if not downright immoral – characters, Besieged City is very hard to sit through. Particularly early on, it has the feeling of a slice-of-harrowing-life docu-drama but at some point turns into a movie with a crime-drama skeleton plotline, which makes it easier to view but also weaker in impact. Our attention becomes more focused on discovering who did it rather than on a troubled society whose youth indulge in temporary, often illicit, pleasures because they can’t see that they have much of a future.

Yvonne Teh