As movie bad guys go, Hong Kong has never seen a cinematic debut like it: a home-grown international star whose mere initials send audiences into paroxysms of blind panic. Better still, this celebrity doesn't demand a percentage.
Welcome to Sars on film. We have gone from panic to popcorn in 90 days. In perhaps the greatest showing of Hong Kong's resilience, the city is not just beating Sars but turning it into entertainment and releasing it at a cinema near you. The coronavirus is starring in 13 films in production, all due for release next month. One, City Of Sars, directed by Steven Cheng Wai-man (Sleeping With The Dead), is a 90-minute independent production. The rest are short films funded by the Government as part of the 1:99 film project and directed by some of the city's most celebrated film-makers. And for once, there are no formulaic scripts, no plots by numbers. 'Sars was a life-changing experience for this city,' says John Sham Kin-fun, the producer behind the 1:99 initiative, a collaborative artists' response to the crisis. 'Film-makers are taking time off from business to record and document the feelings we have had during this extraordinary time.' A communal memory is being captured; but what ideas are emerging?
IT IS 1AM AT MONGKOK'S Hong Kong Eye Hospital, and the SAR's first coronavirus vehicle, City Of Sars, is taking shape. The film has a low budget of only $5 million and a 15-day shooting schedule. Its cast, with the exception of Eric Tsang Chi-wai, is mostly B-list: a former beauty queen here, a member of girl Canto-pop group the Cookies there. But as masked lackeys rush around setting up cameras, adjusting lights and wheeling in props, it is clear this is no simple cash-in. A strange mutation is occurring. The subject of Sars - for months the domain of doctors and scientists - is being passed for the first time to entertainers. Reel and real life are mixing. And nothing shapes a memory quite like the first telling of the tale.
In one corner of a hospital waiting room, 20 gloved-up and surgically gowned film extras are rehearsing their dry, hacking cough and death rattle and passing round a bottle of hand cleaner. In another, Kristy Yeung Kung-yu, a former Miss Asia Pacific, is talking to wardrobe. 'Pink mask or blue?' she asks her assistant. She tries one, then the other, holding her breath between masks. It is May 19, and although Sars is being brought under control it is still killing and causing panic. One of the actors, Jerry Lamb Hiu-fung, has a 14-year-old niece in the Prince of Wales Hospital's isolation ward. No one is comfortable breathing hospital air and while this movie is clearly not going to be science fact, it remains, for the cast, a nerve-wracking distance from science fiction.
Pity the film's scriptwriter, Edmond Wong Chi-woon, 23. Even now, as the cameras roll, he is hunched over, wearing a mask, rewriting scenes and handing fresh pages to the actors. Virus movies have been made before, of course: Outbreak, 28 Days Later, Twelve Monkeys, even the 1958 horror classic The Blob all explore the idea of a fatal contagion spreading through a community. But Wong must be the first virus-genre script-writer whose research demands he look out of the window as well as talk to doctors and watch television. 'It's been intense,' he admits. 'Such a massive, massive experience for this city. It hit everything, from Hong Kong's economy and its place in the world to the way we touch each other. It's not easy to squeeze all that into 90 minutes. I think everyone working on this film feels a tremendous sense of responsibility.' Wong's ingenious approach has been to fashion his script from three linked stories: the first part concerns a jaded doctor who catches Sars and rediscovers his vocation through the kindness of the young nurse (played by Yeung) who treats him. The middle section deals with a teenage girl (Serena Po of the Cookies) who falls in love with a boy she meets in quarantine. It explores how Sars has tested friendships and how neighbours and family have found a new sense of community in crisis. The final story is a dark comedy that follows the owner of a chain of karaoke bars (Tsang) who, having gone bust when Sars scared away his customers, tries to commit suicide by catching the virus. Along the way, the film crams in just about every major media emblem of the disease: the obsession with face masks, the heroic medical workers, the feared super-spreader sneezing in a hotel lobby, the dying mother who begs her young son 'please don't visit me' and the wrecked economy.
'I'm not sure if this film even falls into the same genre as all those other virus films,' says Wong. 'If anything it is closer to a movie about war being fought on the home front. Yes, that's it - a war movie crossed with reality TV.' And reality plays havoc with the happy ending usually required by Hong Kong audiences. The ploys used in Hollywood virus movies - a syringe full of serum administered in the nick of time, for example - are not going to work here. Wong confesses that with so many uncertainties surrounding Sars no one is sure how the film will end. 'You best come back in a couple of weeks,' he says. We will.