Dot 2 Dot is a director's love letter to Hong Kong
Amos Why's new movie is a personal tribute to all the things that make Hong Kong special
The way that the writer-director-producer of Dot 2 Dot sees it, Hong Kong has long had an international dimension.
"Even as a child, I knew that my hometown was an international city," says 43-year-old Amos Why (whose real name is Amos Wong Ho-yin).
"So I was amazed when Tung Chee-hwa, as our then-chief executive, said he wanted Hong Kong to be an international city. What the f***? We already were an international city for at least two decades before."
A paean to his beloved city that makes use of many details related to its cultural heritage and local history, Why's film is about a man who, upon returning to his birthplace after emigrating to Canada as a child, finds that the Hong Kong he knew has disappeared. In a bid to explore the transformed city, he creates cryptic dotted diagrams on the walls of every MTR station.
The marks are spotted by a mainland newcomer, who decides to explore her new home by figuring out the dots.
When Why and his then-writing partner and Academy for Performing Arts classmate Taney Chan Tak-chung first came up with this idea in the late 1990s, they had envisioned their female protagonist as a Japanese woman.