A Summer Ghost Story

Call girl Ruby dates men for pay. Arrested, she seeks help from a lawyer client. He advises her to seek letters of mitigation from people with high social status, and to play along with the probation officer. By performing an act of penitence, Ruby may be given a more lenient sentence. The lies she tells the officer, initially mere tales to solicit sympathy, slowly reveal a heartbreaking story of someone let down by adults all her life.

Cheung Yuk Fan feels suffocated in Hong Kong after 2019. 2021 Summer, She resigns from her job as an arts administrator and rents a flat in a sub-divided unit in an industrial building. She is determined to hide herself in this small world and start her own online trading business, forgetting about the distractions of the outside world. But one day, the beautiful sound of piano playing next door suddenly leads her into a realm of fantasy and illusion.

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.

Fong Ka-Man, has been leading a middle class lifestyle. One day, during a heavy rain in the dusk, bearing the fear of illness, she is unwillingly staying away from the rain inside the tunnel. She first encounters a weird tramp, and then a young farmer who is rushing to deliver his harvest. It’s about how the “normal” passes by the “abnormal”. What makes them “normal” and “abnormal” seems to be realistic, but maybe it is just a void. Fong Ka-Man is anxious to find an exit from the difficult circumstance, but accidentally she finds out that what she yearns for is the disappeared end of this city.