Based in the heart of Hong Kong, the district of Hung Hom feels like a city within a city, a place where the living and the dead coexist almost side by side. Coffins glide through narrow streets toward nearby funeral homes, while a few steps away, commuters and street vendours fight for space among the noise of construction. However, above all that chaos are gleaming luxury apartments, symbols of wealth and modernity. Beneath them, aging tenements crumble in silence, awaiting demolition. This uneasy coexistence becomes the central theme of Wong Siu-pong’s latest documentary, Obedience.

Filmed over five years, Obedience is an observational documentary, a form of nonfiction filmmaking that avoids overt commentary, allowing reality to develop naturally before the camera. There are no talking heads, or if there are, they’re kept to a minimum; no scripted moral lessons, only the rhythm of daily life and the hum of the streets.

Wong began filming in 2017, nine years after the government announced a new railway project that would transform the area. The budget ballooned from HK$30 billion to a staggering HK$100 billion, leaving behind a trail of neglected buildings and displaced families. Among skyscrapers and temples, Wong found a neighborhood suspended between the past and an uncertain future. Through this film, Hung Hom becomes both a real place and a reflection of modern society, where progress comes at a cost, and those who can’t afford to move forward are simply left behind.

There is something profoundly moving in how Obedience frames the relationship between people and what they throw away. The camera stops on the elderly picking through discarded wood and metal, on workers salvaging materials from demolition sites, on everyday citizens negotiating survival in a city that seems to have no space for them. In one sense, Obedience is about waste: material, economic, and human, but fundamentally, it’s a film about inequality. The film reveals a poignant truth about our age: the wealthiest among us can significantly impact the lives of their own citizens, yet they rarely do. Hong Kong, like much of the world, is built upon a paradox; staggering wealth exists side by side with deep poverty, and progress is measured by how efficiently we erase the people who don’t fit into its glossy narrative. Everyone is told to fend for themselves; compassion has become a luxury few can afford.

As Hong Kong becomes increasingly shaped by mainland influence – in its infrastructure, politics, and economic direction, massive development projects continue to change its skyline, reflecting the broader ambitions driving progress across the region. Yet, as Wong subtly reveals, these very projects often bring displacement and environmental collapse in their wake. Money, meant to serve as a tool for improvement, instead becomes a force of distortion – a justification for sacrificing the vulnerable in the name of modernisation. And this is not a uniquely Hong Kong problem. Across the world, from London to Los Angeles, from Delhi to São Paulo, governments and corporations repeat the same narrative: progress demands sacrifice. What Obedience does, so quietly and so powerfully, is ask the question we rarely confront – whose sacrifice?

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Written by Maggie Gogler

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