Hong Kong Tramways is celebrating 110 years of carrying people along Hong Kong Island's northern corridor by decorating 30 trams with movie scenes and holding free outdoor screenings of three films featuring trams.
It hopes the images in those temporary "Moving Film Libraries" will bring back a few tram memories.
The screenings at the Whitty Street Depot start on March 15 with writer-director Ivy Ho's (pen name On Sai) Crossing Hennessy. Next are Patrick Tam Ka-ming's Nomad on April 12 and the 1959 melodrama Typhoon Signal No 10 on May 10.
I'm sure few people who have seen Tam's landmark Hong Kong New Wave film will have forgotten its sizzling sex scene on a tram late one night. However, I have to confess to not having strong memories of any of Crossing Hennessy's tram scenes. I do, however, remember more vividly those scenes in the drama which had Jacky Cheung Hok-yau and Tang Wei meeting at the Honolulu Café and Tang getting all emotional on a pedestrian bridge over Gloucester Road. In fact, quite a few other titles come more readily to mind when I think of films with trams.
Among these is Fruit Chan Gor's The Longest Summer, in which its triad protagonist reacts to being disparaged by a group of schoolgirls - he hurls their leader out of the window on the tram's upper deck.
Then there's Eye in the Sky, Milkyway Image screenwriter Yau Nai-hoi's solitary directorial work to date, with its impressive opening action sequence in a packed tram.