Ng Ka-leung, "Ten Years" Mastermind, Gives Hong Kong a Decade to Choose Its Future
The dystopian movie has been a huge hit in Hong Kong. Its five different depictions of a dark, bleak future for the city won the Best Film gong at the Hong Kong Film Awards last month.
I was born in 1981 in Hong Kong, and raised here. I graduated from PolyU in 2003, studying multimedia design. I’ve worked in post-production, computer graphics, as a drama production assistant in TVB and production houses, and even as a wedding photographer.
The first time I could actually work on my own project was the one before “Ten Years,” called “Fading Marketplaces.” It’s a series of documentaries, recording the stories of hawkers and small shops in Hong Kong. My family had a store in Shek Wu Hui [in Sheung Shui] for decades, until it closed down last year. So when I started my own project, I wanted to record the uniqueness of Hong Kong in its marketplaces, which could be slowly disappearing.
After that, I started to think about my next project. I saw so many problems in Hong Kong, and we were at a bottleneck. Who was affected by these problems? Grassroots Hongkongers. But many were not aware that this situation was affecting them directly. I talked to many people from different walks of life, and asked them three questions about their past, present and future. I realized people’s answers all had something in common. When it came to their future, people actually started to think a lot harder. Some people imagined a brighter future, some a darker one, but it didn’t matter—in their mind, they all had a certain strength to change something in the present.
Read More: Movie Review: Ten Years
Read More: Emmy the Great on Her Bilingual Song and Eurasian Roots
So I decided to create a film about the future of Hong Kong. I worked with the other four directors [Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-wai, Wong Fei-pang, Kwok Zune] because they could all tell the stories of those on the edge of society. Our thoughts and techniques were not that similar, but how we treated the relationship between our work and society was. All five stories describe a future we don’t want to see. We tried to project it to its extreme, because right now, people think that things are still fine.