words yvonne teh

Hong Kong’s poorest district yields a lesson in life in Derek Kwok’s latest film.

Along with his interesting experiences in Sham Shui Po, director-scriptwriter Derek Kwok (The Pye Dog; The Moss) has a raft of good memories. “When I was just a kid,” he says, “before the age of 10, my grandma lived in Sham Shui Po and my mother always took me there every weekend. Sham Shui Po [was] a very good place... There were so many restaurants there, so many toyshops.”

But it obviously wasn’t toyshops that made the now 30-year-old filmmaker move from his parents’ home into his grandmother’s old apartment after he entered the movie industry. And if it wasn’t the restaurants either, he has nevertheless been a resident in the area to this day - and a keen observer of how it has changed over the past 20 years. For one thing, after Langham Place opened in Mongkok in late 2004, the prostitution trade previously centred in nearby Portland Street pushed up into his part of Kowloon. Consequently, brothels abound in Sham Shui Po. “When you walk along the street,” says Kwok, “and you see a neon light - it may be red, may be green - on the door of a building, you know that the second or first floor will be a brothel”. Then he continues with a laugh, “Even in my home, my apartment building, the lower floor is a brothel!”

In another change, with the lowest median monthly domestic household income among Hong Kong’s 18 districts, Sham Shui Po has become a hub for criminal activity. “I think that Sham Shui Po is just like a Sin City or Kowloon Walled City so many years ago,” Kwok says. Indeed, more than Mongkok or Tsim Sha Tsui (Chungking Mansions and all) he thinks it has actually become the new Kowloon Walled City. And so it is appropriate to set a movie like The Moss, whose main male character (local actor Shawn Yue) is a crooked cop and female lead (Mainland actress Bonnie Xian) a prostitute, in his home district.

Still, The Moss is not your usual crime drama even though Kwok fully realizes that movies about cops and gangsters are popular with local filmgoers. In fact, he baldly states, “The box office shows us that Hong Kong audience doesn’t accept other kinds of action movies. We have a star, cop action, that’s what they’ll accept. If it’s something different, it’s not very welcome.” At the same time though, “A cop or a gangster or some action is just the beginning” - which in his second directorial effort he uses as a lure to get audiences into the cinema. But then he wants to tell a different tale. “I want to tell a Buddhist story talking about a mother who at the beginning, lost her child.

The way that Kwok sees it, he has made a film that will appeal to both females and males. “At the beginning, it’s just like an action movie and I think this is good for males. In the middle and at the end, it’s a romantic story for some female audiences though I think that males will like it too!” And even though he initially suggested that the modestly budgeted film’s target audience is 25 to 30-year-olds - his contemporaries - the deeper into our discussion we go, the more it becomes apparent he wants The Moss to have cross-generational appeal. It does, after all, have a multi-generational cast that includes many experienced actors he respects and a young acting talent, as his first film did.

So there’s no doubting Kwok’s sincerity when he states, “I like such cross-generational movies because I think that in Hong Kong, there are so many people who have no hope for the new generation. They think that teenagers are not good, and they do so many bad things - worse than our generation. They have no hope for the future and I think that’s not good.

“The real world is not really like that. I think that every generation has its bad guys and good guys” - the way Sham Shui Po has appealing aspects as well as criminal elements. He acknowledges that the world is not in particularly good shape but he says every generation is the same: each criticizes the following one, though the criticism may not hold much validity.

But rather than just be critical of the critics, Kwok seeks to help bridge generational divides. And so in The Moss he tries to show how the future and the past are connected and to have his audiences realizing that, as he says, “we have to respect the past, do our best in the present and have hope in the future.”

The Moss is currently playing in local theatres.