Lost in Hong Kong, Moonlight co-producer Andrew Hevia’s intended film about the city’s art scene became documentary of his failure to execute the plan
- Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window was supposed to be a documentary about Art Basel Hong Kong and the city’s vibrant art scene
- Realising he was in over his head, Hevia instead filmed a quirky diary about being powerless in a city where you don’t know the rules
Hevia had just finished co-producing Moonlight (2016) but had yet to see how successful that film would be. Perhaps the art world glitterati would have received him with open arms had he come the following year, after it won the Oscar for best picture.
Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window (2019) is a quirky, diary-style record of how Hevia failed to make the structured, conventional documentary he originally had in mind.
A text-to-speech computer program provides unsympathetic, droll, robotic narration and his handheld video camera captures the frustration as he runs around Hong Kong looking for art events to comment on. Four months after landing in the city, he realises that he has no idea who he should be interviewing or where to go.
“You are completely unprepared, you are f***ed. Why did you think this is a good idea? You have a camera and nothing else,” the robot voice unhelpfully announces.
The charm of the film lies in the way it captures the falling apart of a plan and in its exposure of the pretensions of the art world when Hevia charges in like a bull in a china shop. He finds he does not belong in high-end commercial galleries where people sip from champagne flutes, nor at grass roots events where boxed wine is drunk out of plastic cups. “There is talk of arts in seven languages, you understand none of it,” the narrator chides.
There is also a side story about Hevia’s love life as the planned documentary turns into an autobiographical record of how he reconciles being powerless in a place where he doesn’t know the rules, a fact illustrated by the sign on a bus that becomes the film’s title.
It is also a film about Hong Kong, seen through the random fragments of city life that Hevia captured while he was busy getting lost: its divided politics, its colonial history, cramped living conditions and those clichés discovered by new arrivals: “bouncy” fish balls and endless malls.
It was expected Leave the Bus would be screened during Art Basel Hong Kong this year. But following the cancellation of the art fair due to Covid-19, Bonnie Chan Woo, an executive producer of the film, decided to arrange a ticketed online screening through the Hong Kong Arts Centre. This will take place online at 9pm on November 14 and Hevia will join an after-screening virtual talk at 10.30pm.
For details, visit hkac.org.hk.
