Benson Koo’s Perks of Being Wild

It could be argued that director Benson Koo Bun-sam is an artist of contrasts. In the past few years, he’s exhibited paintings and line drawings at Young Soy in Sheung Wan, demonstrating a taste for illustrating the darker elements that exist in all of us – good and evil, villainy and affection, and security violence. His work is raw and meticulously jagged, suggesting an unsettled mind. In June, he showed off some of his sculptures in a collection called MONXXTER, a 3D spin on the painting series, at clothing brand Stillhouse’s Causeway Bay shop. When he decided to screen his short film Cinema Quietude, about the long closed movie theatre on Cheung Chau, it made perfect sense to find a way to show the film in that space.

“We had a few community screenings in Cheung Chau because the last film was about its closed cinema,” he says. “It’s been closed for 20 years but I wanted to show the film there. I came up with the idea and realised [that] for movies you don’t really need a cinema all the time.”

On the surface, that seems contrary to everything filmmakers stand for, the most outspoken of whom advocate loudly for the theatrical experience almost exclusively. But Koo isn’t approaching his films purely as cinema. “I majored in graphic design,” he says. “For me, everything is about visual communication and when I studied the subject formally, it changed my mindset.” 

From art to film

As he speaks, Koo is sitting at a café in a quiet corner of IFC Mall. Unsurprisingly, he has just arrived on the ferry from Cheung Chau, where he’s lived and worked for seven years with his wife, a ceramics artist, and their toddler. He’s decked out in baggy, gender neutral black trousers and A Nightmare Before Christmas graphic tee-shirt, which falls in line with the macabre images in Koo’s art. But Koo himself is approachable and grounded, with a great sense of humour about his career as an artist.

“I didn’t plan to be an artist,” he says, admitting he once had no concept of what art even meant. He credits his awakening to his graphic design education at the now-defunct Hong Kong Chingying Institute of Visual Arts, and to a couple of his closest friends, Samson and Fatty: the former a natural drawing talent and the latter the person who turned him on to music. “This was in school, so we didn’t have a lot of ways to entertain ourselves,” he recalls. “We just went from one of our homes to the next and we played around with various art forms. I got lucky. My family isn’t that arty but they left me to explore for myself, and they weren’t tiger parents.”

Since studying graphic design, Koo has settled into a life as a multi-disciplinary artist. He works in ink and mixed media on paintings and drawings, with many of the themes focusing on childhood memory. He plays in a band, Midnight Cowboy, with friends Olivier Cong and Travis Leung. And he makes films: Between Two Ears and Take Us to the Island in addition to Cinema Quietude, plus his most recent, The Perks of Being Wild.

Some of Koo’s visual art is sensual, inspired by the smell of ink that takes him back to school days learning calligraphy. Some of it is purely reflective. “When my daughter was born I started actively incorporating my childhood into my art and my films,” he says. “I think of my drawings as a mirror for my dark side. A friend told me she feels my artwork seems really dark on the surface, but if you keep looking at it you kind of find the sweet inside. But [Perks] is kind of the opposite. When you’re watching you feel really warm, but the ending will make you a bit sad. Combined they sum up my personality.”

An unconventional career

Young Soy represents artists it refers to as diverse, radical and progressive, and it’s easy to see why Koo slots in nicely. As much as he would love to work in cinema, he believes the door for breaking into the industry the old fashioned way — working on a set, training with a veteran director — has passed. In response, he and his peers have adopted an unconventional DIY model that he argues is actually good for creators. He sees it as the next iteration of filmmaking, in Hong Kong and everywhere else movies are made: self-financing, self-producing, self-distributing and self-marketing. In truth, Koo is glad to have sidestepped the sometimes overwhelming infrastructure of a big production, if only to have escaped the drop-off after a full-throated first feature.

“So you work with the best producers, 100 people work for you, you go to film festivals and then you can’t make the second film,” he says with a shrug. “In a way I’m lucky I didn’t get any funding from the government. What me and my crew did is pure filmmaking.” 

Perhaps the happiest side effect of avoiding the conventional film system is that Koo can meet his audiences where they are – in community centres, cafés, hotels and on beaches. “We’ve done over 100 screenings in Hong Kong [for Perks], and we’ve influenced a lot of younger directors, and even some stage actors,” he says. “They’ve told me [that] because of this film they started doing solo performances in cha chaan tengs or bookshops. I think it’s a really good way to remove the limits from your budget and your imagination. The possibilities are endless.”

The joy of summer

Koo is now gearing up to present The Perks of Being Wild at the ninth Hong Kong Kids International Film Festival, its first screening in a traditional cinema. (For the record, the title isn’t a conscious reference to Wong Kar-wai’s languid summertime drama, Days of Being Wild, though Koo sparks to the idea. “Maybe that’s a good thing,” he muses.)

The 51-minute film follows three friends, Rowan Leung, Cheng Tong-kiu and Yilo To (whose father is a local artist Koo knows) and an island dog (Koo’s dog Okee) as they fritter away a summer on Cheung Chau. Koo wrote the loosely followed script during the pandemic, inspired by the mass exodus from the island by expats that couldn’t come and go freely and were leaving behind empty flats. At the same time he was helping his father-in-law lease a flat for himself and got a peek at scores of vacant homes. 

“It reminded me of when I was young, always going into different [neighbours’] houses because we lived in public housing. During summer holidays everyone would open the doors to let the wind through. It was common to just walk into other houses,” he recalls with a chuckle. “The whole building was our playground.” Koo recaptures that carefree, pre-adulthood spirit with his young non-professional actors, chosen for their lack of polish and authenticity. He didn’t want actors with too much understanding of film language pretending to reenact childhood. 

Over the course of the 100 screenings, Leung, Cheng and To have been invited to post-screening talks as well. “Organisers would set up a stage for us and the three of them just didn’t give a crap. They’d fool around and do what children do. They rarely spoke into the microphones. But that’s what this story is about,” says Koo. 

The story, such as it is, is about the precious time in life when details don’t matter and connections come easily. Koo and the crew deliberately left out any information about each character’s background and family. Despite that, context emerged from cinematographers Zachary Ip Yiu-tung and Tang Kin-yin’s sun-dappled images, giving the film an emotional shape. Leung seems like the kid who is alone too much, where Cheng winds up feeling like the kind of privileged kid who gets away in the end. “We all remembered meeting up for the summer, playing around and never knowing anything about anyone else,” says Koo. That invisible current gives Perks a bittersweet tone most of us will recognise; the warmth that turns to sadness Koo’s friend spoke of.

What’s next

For his next film, which he hopes will be a feature, Koo is diving into Hong Kong’s myriad urban legends of the 1980s and where they came from. He’s already talking to residents from his mother’s generation in order to build a foundation for the production, which will be part drama, part documentary. “I want to explore truth,” he says. Each storyteller in the film will present a subjective, personal view of history; seen together, they will form something of a whole.

Once again, Koo’s crew are also his investors in the film. Would he consider taking a grant? Sure, he says. But even then, “we’ll keep doing our own thing. Any funding is a bonus for us.” Shooting is underway and he expects his indie Wave Picture production house to be at work on it for about a year.

“I still find a lot of inspiration in Hong Kong,” he says. “I love so many places in other parts of the world, but when I’m away after about a month I start to feel really dry. I went to Barcelona for a few months, and was really inspired by the city, but in the end I needed to be back in Hong Kong to execute those inspirations.”

The Perks of Being Wild screens at the Hong Kong Kids International Film Festival (KIFF) on July 19 and August 2, 2025. It will also screen at the Tai Kwun Movie Steps each night from August 1 to 3.