To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the Hong Kong Film Archive has launched Close Encounters with Master Filmmakers: Movie Talks, a three-part series in which leading local directors share their own films alongside works that inspired them. The first edition features acclaimed director Peter Chan, best known for He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (1994), Perhaps Love (2005), Leap (2020), and She’s Got No Name (2025).

Chan’s masterpiece, Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996), opens with a black-and-white shot of Li Xiaojun (Leon Lai) arriving at the Hung Hom Train Station. Having traveled from Northern China to Hong Kong, Xiaojun intends to earn money in the metropolis and marry his fiancée in Tianjin. Like his character, Leon Lai was born in Northern China and migrated to Hong Kong at the age of four. Just as he sings in his 1994 dance-pop track I Was Born In Beijing, Leon confidently announces his identity when the Hong Kong public judged his identity. While Li Xiaojun similarly embraces his identity without shame, his counterpart, Li Qiao (Maggie Cheung), from Guangzhou, speaks Cantonese fluently and desperately conceals her roots.

The film’s English title, Comrades, points to the characters’ shared background and the struggles faced by mainland Chinese migrants trying to build a life in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 90s. Far from home and often feeling out of place, these two lonely newcomers find comfort in each other and gradually grow closer against the backdrop of Tsim Sha Tsui’s mix of glamour and indifference. However, their different visions of the “Hong Kong dream” eventually pull them in different directions. Xiaojun hopes for simple financial security and a quiet life with his fiancée, while Li Qiao is driven by ambition and the desire for wealth and social mobility. It remains “almost” a love story because Xiaojun’s commitment to his marriage stands in the way of their connection, causing their lives to drift apart and cross paths again and again between 1986 and 1995.

The film’s Chinese title, Tian Mi Mi, refers to Teresa Teng’s famous song, a piece known and loved across the Chinese-speaking world. On New Year’s Eve in 1987, Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun try to sell Teng’s cassette tapes, only to notice that local Hong Kong listeners are instead tuned to Cantopop star Alan Tam, making her music feel out of place. By the end of the film, when news of Teresa Teng’s sudden death stops them on a New York street, her image changes completely.

In the post-screening talk, Peter Chan spoke about his own mixed background, born in Hong Kong to Thai-Chinese parents, raised in Thailand, educated in the United States, and later returning to Hong Kong to begin his directing career. This constant movement between places built his work. As he pointed out, many people in Hong Kong cannot really be called “purely” local, as for generations, families have come from the mainland and Southeast Asia because of war, politics, or the search for a better life. Very few can trace a completely rooted local history.

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Thinking of Leon Lai’s song I Was Born in Beijing and its lyrics “who decided fate”, both Lai’s and Chan’s life paths were largely guided by their parents and by larger historical forces beyond their control. Even today, Hong Kong feels like a place in motion, with people constantly arriving and leaving. Through his film, Chan asks a simple question: what does it actually mean to be a Hong Konger? The answer changes from person to person and from one time to another.

At the end of the film, we learn that on the train to Hung Hom Station in 1986, Xiaojun and Li Qiao were already sitting back-to-back without knowing it. Their lives had been connected from the very beginning. It takes them years and a long journey across countries to finally turn around and see each other. This circular ending shows that their story was always linked, even before they met, and that chance and fate often move together in ways we only understand later.

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Written by Jade Wong

Images courtesy of Park Circus/Warner Bros.

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