THIS is one of those all too rare nights, when viewers will want to put the VCR into use to record one side while watching the other. While Pearl is showing the all-time James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause, World offers the best of its Asian Movie Showcase movies with To Liv(e).
The award-winning, sensitive To Liv(e) (World 9.30pm, Original Running Time 106 minutes) is a low-budget movie confronting Hong Kong's potent political issues, ranging from its treatment of Vietnamese refugees, to uncertainty over 1997 and fears on Daya Bay.
The film centres on a series of letters written by Rubie (former ballerina Lindzay Chan) to Norwegian actress Liv Ullman, a long-time critic of the treatment of refugees here. The correspondence amounts to a sensitive analysis of the moral dilemmas the repatriation of the Vietnamese represents to Hong Kong in the run-up to 1997.
The emigration question is less well-handled. Both Rubie and her boyfriend (Fung Kin-chung), and Rubie's brother Tony (Wong Yiu-ming) and his older girlfriend (Josephine Ku) face the question with increasing uncertainty, but their debates often seem contrived.
Overall, though, it is a bold effort by first-time director Evans Chan, who wrote the movie after being incensed by what he felt was an ill-informed attack made by Liv Ullman in January 1990 on Hong Kong's refugee policy.
Look out for Elsie Tu, in her movie debut, playing herself. REBEL Without a Cause (Pearl 9.30pm, ORT 111 mins) was the movie that made James Dean a star and it was the best of his short career. The film's message on youthful alienation is as pertinent today, centring on Deans' unsettled adolescent from a good home who just can't stay out of trouble.