Starting from the Bottom: A New Doc Looks at Hong Kong’s Street Economy

Wong Siu-pong gets very excited when a photographer asks him to stand near a container of garbage on the side of a road in Jordan. She gestures towards it and he almost bounds over to the bin. It’s a funny reaction from Wong, who just a few minutes earlier, in his distributor’s office, was every bit the reserved, thoughtful documentarian who refers to himself as a proud “Hong Kong boy,” one who’s quickly becoming one of the great chroniclers of the city’s life – particularly the anonymous and invisible side of it.

Wong is sitting in Golden Scene’s screening room, fresh off a weekend of Q&As for his latest film, Obedience (十方之地). After three critically acclaimed docs exploring life on Hong Kong’s margins, Obedience demonstrates a significant stylistic step forward for Wong, towards something less formally fixed but no less humanistic. A journalism and communications graduate from Hong Kong Shue Yan University, it was precisely the rigour of journalism that turned him towards filmmaking – that and he wasn’t a great student. Ask him point blank if he’s more journalist or filmmaker and he dodges both labels.

“I didn’t have the passion to be a journalist,” he says, quiet but firm. “I always felt like I was looking at a person in one, maybe two interviews, then that was it. I wanted more time to observe. When I discovered documentary, I thought it was totally different and a bit of an adventure, because you never know what or who you’ll meet or how you’ll work on the location. And I really enjoy telling stories through visuals. I think ‘storyteller’ might be a more suitable label rather than a filmmaker. I think there’s a little difference between these two worlds.”

It’s his patient, intimate camera that is earning Wong something of a reputation as one of Hong Kong preeminent visual bards. With just four films under his belt in 15 years, Wong is committed to his observation style as a way to impact hearts and minds. “And it’s anthropological,” he says. “I like to put more thought into what I’m looking at, rather than just to tell an A to Z story about him or her. I don’t see my films as statements. I like experiencing the journey with my interviewees. So the process takes a long time.”

A long road to documentary

So how did he get here? After graduating in 2010, he took a post-university sabbatical in Taiwan and missed out on the fresh grad job market that summer. He did some freelance work based on the communications part of his degree and pondered his future, always circling back to storytelling. Wong admits he didn’t exactly steep himself in documentary viewing, but says he was inspired nonetheless by Werner Herzog, whose documentaries — including Fata Morgana, Grizzly Man and The Fire Within — are legendary for their freeform production and resistance to traditional language. “He’s in a completely different class and he knows human beings well,” says Wong. “He uses his own method to make his films and no one can compare with his depth of thought, humanity and philosophy.”

As a kid from a working class background, Wong was familiar with life in the shadow of Hong Kong’s glittery towers. He leveraged his PR knowledge to write a documentary film proposal for submission to CNEX, the Chinese Documentary Forum. He won a grant and made his first film: 2013’s Fish Story. Produced by documentary veteran Ruby Yang, it was a look at poverty among divided families from the perspective of two marginalised primary school friends. 

Low-key and intensely personal, looking at Fish Story now reveals the foundations for Wong’s body of work so far. He followed up with Snuggle (2016) and 3CM (2019), the former documenting the lives of three families dealing with terminal illness, and in doing so interrogating concepts of death, duty and acceptance. 3CM similarly documented a woman’s struggle with tuberous sclerosis complex — which she also lost her mother to — and the frustrating, exhausting process of treating the genetic disorder with the government slow to approve medicines that combat the tumours. All three films featured the same unobtrusive yet intimate camerawork that can make them a hard watch, but in some ways they play like traditional docs.

Evolving in style

Wong’s filmmaking and storytelling have matured in Obedience; the observational style he values now has a formal style to match. Shot over five years in rapidly redeveloping Hung Hom, Obedience’s camera sits at the intersection of wealth disparity, development, waste and the invisible people living at it. The title hints at the multiple ideas Wong threads silently though the film, referring to a measurement of area like square feet or city blocks, a Buddhist mantra and a Cantonese pun for collecting trash. Wong layers images from different corners of the district’s micro-economy, and the people who survive in it, on top of each other without voiceover, on-screen text or talking heads. The action is simply presented as is. 

The lack of a guiding hand was a conscious choice for Wong and integral to telling a story we would each interpret ourselves rather than consume. Obedience is free of both sentimentality and judgement and is an enlightening peek into an unseen community. “I wanted to keep the narrative, but now I wanted to take out anything that could trip an overly-emotional response,” he says. By contrast, his first three films are far more gut-wrenching. “I’m aiming for honesty, and to recreate an atmosphere that brings people into the space.”

A story of the streets

Obedience begins with a series of shots at the Kwun Yum Temple Treasury Opening Festival on the 26th day of the Lunar New Year as friends, families, young and old come from across Hong Kong to collect blessings for good fortune. It might as well be Causeway Bay for all the crowds; this is the city’s most venerated Kwun Yum site. The film then pivots to a trio of elderly workers who deal in trash in the shadow of new skyscrapers and the wealth-generating Shatin-Central MTR extension construction site. The idea for the film came when Wong asked himself about defining the mentality and values of Hong Kong and its people. Being familiar with Hung Hom after working nearby years before, he was also familiar with the vanishing recycling shops, the omnipresence of a waste economy and the singular dawn markets – illegal flea markets selling recycled and scavenged goods overnight and gone by the time offices open in the morning. 

Wong says he has “personal reasons” for focusing on the topic. “I had the experience of selling the goods on the street,” he notes, although he declines to provide more details. “So when I find out people are still doing this I wondered, ‘What’s the difference between then and now? What happened to Hong Kong? Is there something interesting I should be looking at? The market street is just behind the rubbish station and opposite the temple. I think this dynamic is interesting. And I want to question the values of this city. I think that event is a very good example that shows how we flow in Hong Kong, how we obey. But who are they obeying? They don’t know. Everyone has their own thought – government, family, I can’t judge everyone – but I want to question this process of obeying.”

Wong inserted himself into the community beginning in 2017 and admits he owes a debt to a recycling shop owner who let him hang around and watch the comings-and-goings on the street. Eventually he became “the documentary guy” and residents started to open up to him. “Otherwise, if I just walked up to people on the street no one would talk to me,” he laughs. “I’d get ‘He’s weird. This guy is terrible. Who are you?’”

A new documentary boom?

Wong’s fifth film should be out later this year, which would make it part of a minor documentary boom in 2024; Winter Chants, Once Upon a Time in HKDSE and the running doc Four Trails also made a splash this year. But Wong says the documentary scene here lacks business infrastructure to support it – things like an ecosystem of Netflix series, feature film adaptations, festival and marketing circuits and a second release platform. That won’t happen in Hong Kong because the city’s primary source for documentary production, RTHK, got out of the game after the 2019 protests and the National Security Law. As for early documentary hits like Cheung King-wai’s KJ Music and Life and Yang’s My Voice, My Life, Wong says they are very specific outliers.

“The topic of both was education. Education is a big topic for Hong Kong audiences,” he says. “Really unique films do make their way to screens, but everyone is scrambling to find funding and resources overseas. I don’t know what to make of it. But I would say let’s see if we can have another four or five next year. Then maybe six quality docs for the three to six years after that. Then we can start to talk about how we have a documentary industry in Hong Kong. Otherwise they’re just another movie.”

Despite the caution, Wong is doing his part by educating the next generation of filmmakers by teaching documentary filmmaking at Baptist University and serving as an advisor to Eye Catcher, a filmmaking incubator, when he’s not observing the city and trying to make it better. He hopes audiences take the message of Obedience beyond Hung Hom.

“I want people to change their perspective on how they see people. The title, in Buddhism, means there are ’10 ways to represent our universe.’ There are many invisible people in Obedience, but they’re also very important to Hong Kong. There are many, many small worlds and people to support the whole universe. I hope Hong Kong people will change their mind or change their perspective when they see people not from the top. That’s what I’m doing in all my work.”

Obedience is playing in limited release. Refer to Golden Scene for updated screening schedules.