It's a madhouse

For aspiring homeowners struggling with soaring property prices, watching director Pang Ho-cheung's latest film, Dream Home, might be cathartic - and not only because it is filled with bloodthirsty scenes. Rather, it's because the film satirises how local property tycoons whip up a fervour among the populace for ever newer and plusher apartments - a desire that drives the protagonist, a failed homebuyer, to commit the most gruesome murders ever seen in a Hong Kong film.

Dream Home shows how 'property developers are manipulating Hong Kong', says Pang, citing its depiction of the harrassment of those who refuse to sell their homes to companies that want to redevelop their blocks.

It's ironic that the film's major backer is Stanley Ho Hung-sun, president of the Real Estate Developers Association of Hong Kong and chairman of Shun Tak Group, which counts among its recent projects the transformation of several old tenement blocks on Chatham Road, Hung Hom, into high-end apartment buildings. It owes this link to its star and producer, Josie Ho Chiu-yee, Stanley Ho's daughter.

Josie Ho sees Dream Home as the project to launch 852 Films, the production company she set up with husband Conroy Chan Chi-chung using funding from her father.

'I did tell him what I'd be doing, but he didn't say anything,' she says. 'I think as long as we are using the money to do something serious and not fool around, he'd feel fine with whatever we do.'

Her mother and siblings, however, weren't as relaxed about it.