Golden Horse Awards 2021 nominations: Hong Kong film Drifting leads all contenders, and city’s 2019 protests feature in two documentaries

Hong Kong poverty drama Drifting leads the field at the 57th Golden Horse Awards this year, with 12 nominations in categories that include best film, best director, best adapted screenplay, as well as acting nods for four of its actors (Francis Ng Chun-yu, Loletta Lee Lai-chun, Tse Kwan-ho and Will Or Wai-lam).

Drifting is closely followed by three Taiwanese films – Cheng Wei-hao’s sci-fi thriller The Soul, Chung Mong-hong’s pandemic drama The Falls, and Giddens Ko’s fantasy romance Till We Meet Again – which received 11 nominations each, and are all in the race for best narrative feature.

While Jun Li Chun-sek’s Drifting, like Hand Rolled Cigarette last year, flies the flag for a new generation of Hong Kong filmmakers, two fabled names from the city’s “Second Wave” cinema are recognised: Fruit Chan Gor’s horror comedy Coffin Homes has three nods (best original screenplay, action choreography and original film song), while Clara Law Cheuk-yiu received a lone nomination in the best director category for Drifting Petals.

Also of note is the best live-action short film nomination for All the Crows in the World, the best short film award winner at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Its director Tang Yi, a mainland Chinese filmmaker who studied in Hong Kong and received funding for her project in the city, represents a rare mainland presence on this year’s nomination list, as China continues its boycott of the event.

And Beijing will certainly not be pleased by the best documentary feature nomination for Revolution of Our Times, Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai’s film on the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20 that was presented as a special screening at Cannes 2021. The social chaos also provided the backdrop for art-house auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s The Night, a best documentary short nominee, which was shot on the streets of Causeway Bay in November 2019.