The ProjectorHow China is making realist films about Hong Kong instead of fantasy portrayals

Chinese director Bai Xue’s debut feature The Crossing (2018) may have been critically acclaimed on the film-festival circuit both at home and abroad – it premiered in Toronto to rave reviews and won two awards at Pingyao – but it floundered at the Chinese box office when it opened, on March 15.

The film earned just 8.2 million yuan (US$1.2 million) during its first week – and that figure would have been even lower were it not for the support of the cinema chain owned by the movie’s financiers, Wanda Media, as other exhibitors pulled it from their screens.

This contrasts sharply with the interest the film stirred in Hong Kong. Its three screenings at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (the last of which will take place on April 1) have sold out.

The film revolves around 16-year-old Peipei (Huang Yao), a Shenzhen dan fei – the term used to describe a child born of a Hong Kong-China marriage – who falls in with the wrong crowd as she seeks money and meaning in her lonely life. But this is no exploitative flick à la Johnny Mak Dong-hung’s Lonely Fifteen (1982) or Philip Yung Chi-kwong’s May We Chat (2013), films that thrive on graphic, voyeur­istic depictions of young women caught up in the flesh trade.

The Crossing’s innocuous-sounding Chinese title, Guo Chun Tian, which trans­lates to “passing springtime”, is actually smuggler’s code for having successfully cleared customs checkpoints. Peipei’s initiation into a cross-border smuggling ring is a powerful if slightly sanitised depiction of the real-life illicit goods trade between Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

The film plays out like a taut thriller. Scenes in which the uniform-clad Peipei and her associates navigate their way through checkpoints with contraband rival those in the 2017 Thai exam-scam hit, Bad Genius , for their dynamism and skill.