Project Detail

Hong Kong: City on Fire

Synopsis

This urgent film beds in with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations, offering a frontline portrait of four young protesters through a year of struggle. We see their hopes for a freer life and feel their fears as the authorities crack down. Pulse-racing scenes bring the viewer to street level, where peaceful protest is met with fury and tear gas. Clear-eyed about the complications and contradictions that come with a movement that changed Hong Kong forever, it is a brave document of troubled times.

Official Selection CPH:DOX Festival 2021 - F:act Award - World premiere

Details

Year
2021
Type of project
Features
Running time
90 mins
Format
Digital
Director
Choi Ka Yan, Lee Hiu Ling 1st Feature
Producer
Sinead Kirwan, Mark Lacey
Executive Producer
Mark Thomas
Editor
Yip Yu Han
Director of Photography
Yuen Yin, Yeung Ka Yan; Lee Hiu
Sound
Claire Asenova
Composer
Adrian Leung
Assistant Producer
Chu Wah
Line Producer
Mark Lacey
Colourist
Stephen C. Horne
Online Editor
Gordon McAteer
Motion Graphics Design
Audrey Choi

Categories

Production Status

Production Company

Enemy Productions T/A Enemy Films

2/7 Duke Place
Edinburgh EH6 8HP

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

A man stood on a chair wipes water vapour with his hand off the glass cover of a memorial board in a stone brick chapel. Adlais

Director: Alex Darby, George Leith, Sophie Mei Birkin

Year: 2026

Adlais (Echo) weaves Welsh language folklore and histories through their shared subjects of poetry and drowning – and asks whether we’re listening to the past as it surfaces today.

A woman paints on a large canvas in bright colours The End of Times

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.

A lady with white hair sat in a chair talking with a customer surrounded by fabrics Tobias and the Angel

Director: Mark Forbes

Year: 2021

Tobias & The Angel are famous for their shop in West London where all the different aspects of what they do that are combined to make it feel like home. The shop is owned and run by Angel Hughes and has a story to tell about her family beginnings.