TVB
is not what it used to be. Recently, pro-democracy viewers and advertisers have
started boycotting the Hong Kong network, due to its pro-Beijing, anti-“One
China, Two Systems” biases. However, Ah Hoi and his elderly mother Ah Ma still
watch the broadcast channel out of habit. Old ways die hard and so do old hitmen
in Linhan Zhang’s short film The Last Ferry from Grass Island, which
would have screened during the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, had the CCP not
covered up the extent of the Wuhan outbreak and falsely denied it involved
human-to-human transmission. (Some selections have still been made available
for press coverage.)
Ah Hoi is old school. He still speaks Cantonese and watches 1980’s movies, like Police Story (co-starring Last Ferry’s lead actor Tai-Bo). Of course, he does not panic when a young hired gun sneaks onto his fishing boat to cap him, especially when he recognizes she is his former Mainland Chinese protégé, Xiao Ma.
Last Ferry unfolds as a wistfully elegiac slow-burn thriller, but astute Hong Kong watchers will read some between-the-lines commentary regarding the HK localism movement and traditional HK culture. To put it bluntly, this is a film about a Mainlander sent to murder a pre-1997-generation Hong Konger, after all.
Ah Hoi is old school. He still speaks Cantonese and watches 1980’s movies, like Police Story (co-starring Last Ferry’s lead actor Tai-Bo). Of course, he does not panic when a young hired gun sneaks onto his fishing boat to cap him, especially when he recognizes she is his former Mainland Chinese protégé, Xiao Ma.
Last Ferry unfolds as a wistfully elegiac slow-burn thriller, but astute Hong Kong watchers will read some between-the-lines commentary regarding the HK localism movement and traditional HK culture. To put it bluntly, this is a film about a Mainlander sent to murder a pre-1997-generation Hong Konger, after all.
