by Philip Yung
Detective Chong hides his face behind horn-rimmed glasses, a grey fringe and a round-the-mouth beard. As a hardboiled veteran of his field, there is almost nothing he hasn’t seen. But his latest case has got a real kick to it: the bloody crime scene is witness to a dreadful murder, the offender is at hand – but where’s the body? Director Philip Kung casts off the old-fashioned rules of genre as he explores the past of both victim and perpetrator over three different time frames. A fascinating and bleak vision captured in Hong Kong camera master Christopher Doyle’s own fragmented visual language. ZFF presents the director’s cut of the closing film of this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival.