Goodbye, Gran Lai

Via Dolorosa captures director’s journey in reconnecting with Vietnamese homeless persons whom she filmed for another short film two years ago. While she accompanied a man in his final days, Jo searched within herself to resolve the original sin of the documentary filmmaker as a bystander to the suffering of others.

310 Tung Chau Street is a tenement building in Sham Shui Po. Three Vietnamese from the same province share a subdivided flat. Unemployment, drug addiction, and arguments brew and breed incessantly in this heated environment. During filming, the two young directors were encumbered by a series of obstacles, which turned the process into a chance to reflect on documentary truth.

"5 cops only in Sham Shui Po tonight!" PC46700 said. In the deep of the night, a police officer was dispatched to an old building where he found a Vietnamese drug addict in a partitioned room. His investigation was inexplicably filmed by a would-be documentarian, which led to a conversation with the police constable recollecting his early days and involvement with the Vietnamese refugees more than twenty years ago. An apparently unrelated group of people had this unexpected encounter when the majority of the police force gathered at Mongkok during the Umbrella Movement.

Ka-long, a wanderlust graduated from the University of Hong Kong, always dreams of backpacking to many countries with his guitar. While he believes he is trapped in Hong Kong, his family thinks that he is simply wasting his life and not settling down for a better future. He is getting more uplifted after he meets Wen-wen, a girl speaks with a Taiwanese accent. While they are dating, Wen-wen makes an effort to hide her true identity from Ka-long. Can they finally resolve the undercurrent of their relationship? Let’s Get Lost ultilises the thematic motif of road movie genre – both protagonists have to embark on a journey of revealing their true identity. As a result, the film widens its scope to the geo-political differences between Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.