House of the Lute

Three lazybones friends manufacture a firebomb and place it in a cinema. Pearl, a sadistic young girl, has observed the scene, follows the bombers and starts to manipulate them. The four criminals plan more and more daring acts.

The murder of a crewman while ashore in Hong Kong leads his friend and shipmate to partner with a local to find the killer. The murkier back alleys are explored and periodic fights break out as someone wants their investigation to end.

Former Vietnamese soldier Nguyen Dich (Chow Yun-Fat) comes to HK after the Vietnam war, as a professional killer for a gang leader. Here he meets and falls in love with Vicky Lee (Rosamund Kwan). He is ordered to kill her father, and later given the order to kill her too as she started to suspect him. She then discovers that he is responsible for her fathers death...

In Lei Gu Town in Sichuan, Xu who lost his wife during the 2008 earthquake is ready to get married again. His hesitation arises when he sees that his teenage daughter Shan is not yet ready to move on. Shan goes for a walk to landslide dam for a moment of solitude. The dam was formed when landslide debris fell and destroyed a whole village. It is an aftermath of the quake, yet it is at the same time a beautiful scenery. Perhaps not all things brought by a disaster are negative, Shan wonders.

The film consists of two police stories. Both of them happened within the last few days prior to the Hong Kong Handover in 1997. Part 1 - One Body Two Flags is about two middle age cops on the way to the airport, looking back on Hong Kong and at their own lives. It explores the bomb issues during the 1967 Hong Kong Riot, and the police uprising against the anti-corruption agency, ICAC, in 1978. Part 2 - The 5th depicts the turbulent love relationship between a young traffic police and his pro-democracy activist girlfriend amid the major political movement in 1989, and the 1997Hong Kong Handover. The title came from Beethoven's 5th Symphony which was used by the police to drown out the demonstrations on that fateful night.

hong kong films