Master of bleak chic

Soi Cheang is in many respects a giant of the Hong Kong film industry, but in just as many ways he’s one of its most overlooked players. That may change in the coming weeks, thanks to his latest film, Mad Fate, which opened the 47th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) on Thursday. Cheang is the festival’s Filmmaker-in-Focus this year.

“He’s a key figure among Hong Kong’s post-1997 generation of filmmakers and notable for his somber but unmistakably personal visual style,” says HKIFF’s executive director, Albert Lee. A genre filmmaker in the truest sense of the word, Cheang has made crime thrillers, horror, fantasy and noir. He is known to film buffs and industry pros as one of Hong Kong cinema’s great bleak-chic stylists. “In the stark dystopia he creates, where one confronts moral bleakness and human perseverance, Soi never fails to detect a ray of hope,” adds Lee.

Born in Macao and a resident of Hong Kong since the age of 11, Cheang started working in cinema at 19. In the early 1990s, would-be filmmakers in Hong Kong trained either at TVB or the Academy for Performing Arts. Cheang went his own way, teaching himself the trade and managing to convince titans such as Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs, 2002), Ringo Lam (1987’s City on Fire), and Johnnie To (Exiled, 2006; Drug War, 2012) at Milkyway Image to take him on as a production assistant. Later, he would serve as the first assistant director to some of them.

In a case of coming full circle, Milkyway had a hand in producing Mad Fate. “(To) is a great master. Whenever I go back to Milkyway, it’s like … taking a one-year course to learn, or relearn, what filmmaking is,” says Cheang. “Maybe one day I’ll get to his level. Maybe never. But I can aspire to it.”

Cheang’s first significant release, Diamond Hill, came in 2000. An unconventional romance set inside the rapidly transforming old district, it announced Cheang as a filmmaker unafraid to go down narrative paths many would avoid. But with Dog Bite Dog (2006), Cheang started to cement a visual language and hallmark themes and motifs that would become his signature. The constant push-and-pull between fate and free will, faith and reason, essentially light and dark, informs his films, binding them into a single, cohesive whole. Corruption and decay became Cheang’s guiding motifs, even when they didn’t seem like the obvious choice. The cop on the trail of a hitman in Dog is to be expected, but it’s in this film that the line between the good guy and bad guy was blurred forever.

The same can be said of the martial artist in prison for murder and the fellow inmate who trains him in Shamo (2007), a brutal twist on the sports movie; of Love Battlefield (2004), arguably one of Hong Kong’s most nihilistic love stories ever; and of SPL II: A Time for Consequences (2015), a sprawling, sweaty martial actioner that stitches together family bonds in a criminal underworld and then proceeds to rip them apart.

Violence is never far away in Cheang’s films — something he’s quick to admit — but as Lee noted, redemption is right behind. Cheang’s grisly, grimy peak came with 2021’s Limbo, whose stark black-and-white absorbs its characters, removing any distinction between human beings and the filth around them.

“I think the violence (in the film) was necessary because the whole story is about atonement,” argues the director. “It’s a process, and it’s about going from one hell to another, where the other person may not want to forgive your transgressions. Without the violence, that process has no meaning.”

In more full circles, Cheang is also one of the local industry’s great mentors, producing films for emerging filmmakers such as Wong Hing-fan (2019’s i’m livin’ it) and Lau Kok-rui (The Sunny Side of the Street, 2022). Next up is an adaptation of comic artist Andy Seto’s City of Darkness — starring Louis Koo. It’s a kung fu actioner set in the 1980s inside the now-mythic Kowloon Walled City.

“Everyone talks about the Walled City as if it were a crime-ridden hellhole, but in the ’80s, it was a different space. It provided people who were working in industries just outside the lines with a way to make a living,” says Cheang. “This was also a really significant moment in Hong Kong — 1984. After that, the Walled City no longer had value. It’s an interesting moment,” he says. After a pause, he adds, “And besides that, I want to make one of those exaggerated, martial arts movies.”

Also on the Filmmaker-in-Focus program are Our Last Day (1999), Horror Hotline… Big Head Monster (2001), New Blood (2002), Home Sweet Home (2005), Accident (2009), Motorway (2012), and an audience face-to-face following a screening of Limbo on April 8.