A Place of Dusk

A bullied teenage girl forms an unlikely friendship with a mysterious young man who protects her from her assailants, while she copes with the pressures of her final examinations.

As a long-standing bar prepares to close, owner Hung and his young staff member Yip set out to return unclaimed bottles of wine to their owners. Through these encounters, Yip learns the deep connections between the wines and their stories, gaining insight into Hung’s philosophy. Alongside veteran bartender Bill, passionate mixologist Grace, and singer Adam, they create lasting memories for their customers in the bar’s final days.

High school teacher Cheng looks back to his repressed childhood memories, as he finds an anonymous suicide note in the classroom. He strives hard to prevent another tragedy from happening, meanwhile facing a series of family problems, his wife is divorcing him, and his father is dying.

Set in Hong Kong, Eya is a shy teen who takes writing as a way to escape alienation, bullying and loneliness. On the school fun day Eya remains silent in the interview, but she is not the only one who finds life is too hard to bear. Everything is changed that morning.

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.

After losing his son in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, a disillusioned old man chooses to stay silent and block out the noises of political bickering in the city. After all, nothing anyone does ever seem to make any difference. With the quick deterioration of freedom in Hong Kong, how much longer can the old man choose to stay silent before the oppression becomes too much? Amidst the noises from all sides, which side should we listen to, or should we simply stay apathetic and block out the noise altogether?

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.

A retired British Chinese soldier, a young South Asian man, an encounter at Chungking Mansions. Coincidentally, they both offended the same gang boss. What has given them a new lease of life and how do they rediscover themselves through each other's company.

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.

Luggage? Check. Travel document? Check. Keys? Check. The Year is 2040 and Ching is all set to embark on a mission to track the whereabouts of a dog and its owners which will transport her back in time before she was even born. In 2013, an age of mobile phones and Google Maps, the time-traveller meets a painter and piques his curiosity to join in her quest. Can she reach the parents she never had the chance to get to know and will he find a purpose in life after tempting fate and death? Will the mementos of their brief encounter – a painting that crystallises the artist’s feelings for her and a keepsake pendant that has been passed down for generations – survive the time and reconnect the two?

As Hong Kong teeters on the brink of change, an undercover cop risks everything to expose corruption and take down a powerful triad gang before the 1997 handover.

The textbook definition of a good citizen is a person who works hard, helps others and respects the law. A night minivan driver witnesses a crime and chases the robber down an alley and confronts him. A bloody fistfight ensues. But when the shot cuts to his close-up in the confined space of the interrogation room, we find him looking ragged and unkempt, trying hard to give a coherent account of what had happened to a hostile plain clothes cop, wondering if it pays to be a good citizen when one becomes punished for one’s own good intentions.

“Ambivalence means… nothing has happened, but you remember everything.” Another coming-of-age story about youngsters who are always desperate for but also afraid of falling in love, director Heiward Mak (High Noon, Ex, Diva) continues to examine the ambivalence of youthful love like an autopsy in this episodic adventure among a group of twenty-something. These characters might be a bunch of losers in love who are searching for self-esteem and recognition, but what make these intertwining tales relevant today are not just the pain and longing, but also the bittersweet memories and emotional growth of Hong Kong’s post-90s generation.