From Kowloon Walled City to 1910s Copenhagen: the international Oscar contenders with boldly imagined film worlds

Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In - Hong Kong

Macau-born Hong Kong director Soi Cheang was hesitant when asked to direct Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In — an ambitious project set in the 1980s against the iconic Kowloon Walled City — fully aware that reconstructing the now demolished enclave would be quite a roadblock.

Without clear jurisdiction from either the British Hong Kong government or China, the walled city was a cramped, maze-like settlement with interconnected tenement blocks packed together, making it a haven for criminals who essentially controlled the enclave, resisting attempts at municipal regulation.

Cheang talked to key collaborator Kenneth Mak before committing to the action thriller, which launched to international audiences as a Cannes midnight screening and is Hong Kong’s submission to the best international feature Oscar. The feted production designer handled period sets for Wilson Yip’s Ip Man franchise and worked with Cheang on noir thriller Limbo, which swept the art direction prizes at the Asian Film Awards, Hong Kong Film Awards and Golden Horse Awards in 2021-22.

Cheang spent two weeks with Mak on research to make sure they could satisfyingly deliver the film’s hero location before finally giving assent to production company Entertaining Power’s Angus Chan, who owned the film rights to the novel City Of Darkness by Yuyi, set in the walled city

Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In is adapted from the book, which itself spawned a comic-book series, but the art team relied on old archival photos, including from Japan and France, for visual reference. The film takes place during Hong Kong’s economic boom in the 1980s — the walled city was razed to the ground in 1994 before Hong Kong’s historic handover to China three years later.

“Despite the vices, it offered a temporary shelter for immigrants to eke out a meagre living before they moved on,” says Cheang, adding that audiences can experience what life was like in the walled city through protagonist Chan Lok-kwan, played by Raymond Lam, a refugee who goes into hiding there and fights fierce battles to protect his new home.

The action extravaganza is packed with fast-paced fight sequences choreo­graphed by Hong Kong-based Kenji Tanigaki, whose credits include Raging Fire and Japan’s Rurouni Kenshin film franchise.

“I am eager to bring back the old way of life on screen and evoke memories and feelings of what has been lost along with the walled city,” says Cheang.

World builders

The filmmaker was mindful that the city’s world of organised crime and unsanitary living conditions had already been depicted on screen in action films such as 1984’s Long Arm Of The Law.

Cheang’s brief for the art team was to “create a place so full of life that the audiences can feel and smell it”. The daily experiences of the residents — such as how they make dumplings, repair shoes or clean the temple — are some of the moments that pulled on his heartstrings. Even the TV antennae on the rooftops and the exposed pipes and drains for him accentuate the beauty in the chaos.

The film’s reported budget of around $40m is a gamble that paid off for Entertaining Power and backers including Media Asia (which also handles international sales) and Sil-Metropole. Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In grossed $13.7m in Hong Kong and an additional $96m in mainland China, and sold widely outside Asia to North America, Europe and the Middle East. Well Go USA Entertainment released it in the US in August.

Filming took place in Hong Kong during the pandemic, in an abandoned school in Yuen Long and a studio in Sai Kung. The elaborate sets included a barber shop, a Hong Kong-style cafe, a temple, a rooftop, mom‑and-pop stores and winding alleys. The structures were built up to three storeys high, with VFX used to enhance the exterior shots.

Cheang feels sad the sets were demolished after filming, as it is costly to keep them. Now the Hong Kong government has realised the potential of a tourist attraction, installing an exhibition to display replicas of several memorable sets at Hong Kong International Airport. New sets will be built for a prequel and a sequel that are in the works.

Cheang has directed two dozen feature films since his 1999 debut Our Last Day, including 2009’s Accident and 2012’s Motorway, both produced by Johnnie To; and 2021’s Limbo and 2023’s Mad Fate, which both premiered in Berlinale Special. He is currently making a historical war epic in China, literally translated as The Sea Battle Of Penghu from the Chinese title.

Silvia Wong

Grand Tour - Portugal

Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes depicts Asia in an idiosyncratic, era-blurring, and both imagined and verité way in his feature Grand Tour. Winner of the director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film is set in 1917 and follows English civil servant Edward Abbot (Goncalo Waddington) as he travels across the continent, keeping one step ahead of fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate), whom he has decided not to marry.

Much of Grand Tour — Portugal’s submission to the international feature Oscar — was shot in a Lisbon studio, but it also includes footage from a journey across Asia taken by Gomes in early 2020.

“Making films is a bit like departing from home and living an adventure,” says the Tabu filmmaker, reflecting on the parallels between himself and the protagonists. “Grand Tour is not only a big adventure for me and all the people who made the film, but it’s also an adventure film.”

In Cannes, critics talked about Gomes’s radical formal approach, described in Screen International’s review as “a hypnotic and inventive Asian odyssey”, in which these colonial English characters speak the dialogue in Portuguese. “Maybe it’s true but, at the same time, the film has more connection with the memory of American classical cinema,” says Gomes, citing the likes of Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express and screwball comedies such as Bringing Up Baby.

A Portugal-Italy-France co-production, Grand Tour is lead-produced by Lisbon’s Uma Pedra No Sapato. Mubi picked up rights for North America, the UK, Latin America and several other markets after Cannes from sales agent The Match Factory. A timely US release will make it eligible for all the main Oscar categories.

Literary influences

Grand Tour was “inspired by two pages” in The Gentleman In The Parlour: A Record Of A Journey From Rangoon To Haiphon by UK writer W Somerset Maugham, about the author’s travels in the 1920s.

“He has two pages where he tells this sort of joke about a man engaged to a woman, waiting for her in the port of Rangoon,” says Gomes. “She comes by boat. He just panics and runs away — and she came after him for months in a vast territory in Southeast Asia.”

Gomes reveals his admiration for authors from this period and earlier, including Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Herman Melville. “There is a character [in the film] called Sanders, a strange cowboy who works in Vietnam and Burma. He has cattle there. He was a little bit based on the main character of The Portrait Of A Lady [by James].”

Grand Tour may have literary origins, but much of it has a semi-documentary feel. It uses verité-style imagery of puppets, forests, ferris wheels, martial-arts performers and street scenes ­— “very diverse footage”, in Gomes’s words — all linked by a voiceover. “From the start, we were interested in not only having this world of cinema inside the studio,” he says. “We also wanted reality, to have a dialogue between the imaginary and reality.”

That is why Gomes and a small team of collaborators took a real-life grand tour in 2020. Their itinerary “corresponded to this traditional circuit called the Asian Grand Tour”. The route, though, was not quite the same as that taken by the story’s protagonists — Gomes and his team did not make it to Hong Kong. “It was very difficult because it was in the moment where you had all the protests and riots,” he says.

Gomes’s travel companions were his screenwriters, a sound engineer, two camera assistants, an assistant director and one of the film’s three cinematographers, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, known for his work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Luca Guadagnino.

“Then we had local production in every [one] of these countries,” says Gomes. “The idea was to shoot this itinerary, doing this grand tour ourselves [through Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan and China], and see what kind of things we could collect from the trip. Then we would get back to Lisbon and try to react to these images, our archive… by creating fiction.”

The plan was always to have two cinematographers, an Asian one for the trip and his regular Portuguese collaborator Rui Pocas (Gomes’s Tabu, Our Beloved Month Of August and The Face You Deserve) for the studio scenes back in Europe. But the Asian trip ground to a halt at the start of 2020, thanks to the pandemic, just as the production was headed for Shanghai.

The crew returned to Portugal. Gomes shot the Chinese scenes two years later, directing remotely from Lisbon, instructing his “100% Chinese crew” and his third cinematographer, Guo Liang.

“I never met him personally during the shoot because I could not enter China,” says Gomes. “I went to Jia Zhangke’s festival [Pingyao] and finally met this DoP. It was quite a weird situation.”

In Grand Tour, which is shot primarily in black and white, viewers are “always passing from seeing the characters in the studio and seeing the real world today, and then you have a voiceover that forces you to project the characters, but they are not there,” says Gomes. “You see the same places but in a very different way, between the artificial world of cinema and reality.”

Storytellers are often warned to “show, don’t tell”. Gomes turns the advice on its head by doing both. “I think it’s [more] fun,” he smiles.

Geoffrey Macnab 

Universal Language - Canada

Geographically speaking, Canada’s entry to the international film Oscar is set in Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba tagged the country’s ‘Gateway to the West’ and known for its distinctive architecture and bone-chilling winters. But according to its director Matthew Rankin, Universal Language occupies an “interzone” somewhere between Winnipeg and Tehran.

The filmmaker grew up in the Canadian city, which is the setting of the childhood story told by his grandmother that sparked the film, while Tehran is home to the Iranian cinema that inspired him early in his career, even prompting a “naïve” plan to attend film school in the Islamic republic.

As far apart as Winnipeg and Tehran may be on the map, the surreal comedy, with its mix of Canadian whimsy and Iranian neorealism, is trying, says its maker, “to create proximity where we might imagine great distance”. This second feature from Rankin, following 2019’s The Twentieth Century, blends several stories, including a pair of siblings attempting to free a bank note from the ice, a tour guide trailing his group to dull Winnipeg destinations, and a Quebec civil servant who quits his job to travel home to the city and visit his mother.

One way of establishing the unique concept of place was to shoot — from a script Rankin wrote with Iran-born, Montreal-based creatives Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi — almost entirely in Iran’s predominant language of Farsi, and with Farsi signage in place of English markings on the film’s shopfronts and offices.

The use of Farsi rather than English met no resistance from the film’s backers in Quebec, the centre of Canada’s French-language film industry, reports Rankin. And it helped establish the film’s sense of “being in one space and another simultaneously. It was always about creating a space that was both places and neither at the same time — creating a third space, if you will.”

Universal Language used locations in Winnipeg and Montreal (where Rankin and producer Sylvain Corbeil are based) and shot most of its interior scenes in an abandoned hydroelectricity plant. Winnipeg’s neutral-coloured brutalist and mid-century modern architecture figures prominently on screen, with the buildings often framing the film’s human characters and at the same time creating another link with Iran.

“When I first went to Iran, the beige, brutalist buildings reminded me very much of Winnipeg,” Rankin recalls of his youthful visit to the country, whose globally admired film culture he wanted to study. “And for my collaborators, who had never been to Winnipeg before we started working on this film, the beige architecture of Winnipeg reminded them of Tehran. So there was this architectural echo between the two cities.”

The Winnipeg architecture gave the film an added aesthetic dimension, says the director, whose The Twentieth Century was shot entirely in-studio: “When the winter sun hits the beige, these boring structures actually become kind of divine and beautiful. They become glowing surfaces of light. That was something I really wanted to film.”

The project’s production design (by repeat Rankin collaborator Louisa Schabas) and costume design (by Iran’s Negar Nemati, whose credits include Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero) presented other opportunities to “walk a line between the banal and the divine”.

“I think of Canadian culture as being very beige and bureaucratic,” says Rankin. “That’s something we wanted to have fun with. Both the absurdity and the beauty is something we wanted to reflect.”

Universal Language’s score, meanwhile, became “a musical metaphor for the whole movie”, combining the electro-ambient sounds of Quebecois composer/musician Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux with the work of Iranian-Canadian Amir Amiri, an expert on the santur, a Persian classical instrument.

Though Lamarche-Ledoux and Amiri had never even met before joining the project, Rankin put them together to create music for a single sequence in the film and was so happy with the result he commissioned a full score, which represents, he suggests, “a total merging of minds and skills”.

Since it premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, where it took the audience award, Universal Language has gone on to win honours in Melbourne, Toronto, Pingyao and elsewhere, apparently living up to its title and to the concept of turning distance into proximity. Oscilloscope Laboratories is releasing in the US on February 12, with Best Friends Forever handling international sales.

As the director and his collaborators have taken the film around the world, both Iranian viewers with little knowledge of Canada and Canadian viewers with little knowledge of Iran “have said to us that the film has made them feel nostalgic”, reports Rankin.

“With Canada and Iran being so intertwined, so deeply intercoded in the movie, I can only interpret that as people feeling nostalgic for each other.”

John Hazelton 

The Girl With The Needle - Denmark

Magnus von Horn had nearly everything he needed to bring The Girl With The Needle to life — the right cast and crew, a finely honed screenplay and atmospheric locations in small Polish towns. There were just three more ingredients that would help him tell the story exactly the way he envisioned: mud, water and smoke.

“We would throw mud out on the streets, then wet it all down and start the smoke machines. These were our three main elements on every location,” recalls the Sweden-born, Poland-based filmmaker.

This third feature from von Horn ­— which premiered in Competition at Cannes and represents Denmark for the international feature Oscar ­— will be released by Mubi in North America, Latin America, the UK and several other markets. Vic Carmen Sonne stars as naïve factory worker Karoline, who meets a charismatic but dangerous woman named Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) in late-1910s industrial Copenhagen after she is deserted by the wealthy man who impregnated her. (The story is inspired by a real-life case about a Danish woman who killed unwanted babies.)

Shot in black and white by director of photography Michal Dymek — whose credits include von Horn’s second feature Sweat — The Girl With The Needle presents a hard-scrabble Copenhagen stuck in the shadows of the First World War. “It’s an oppressive place and a story about people oppressing each other,” explains von Horn. “This city is not welcoming.”

Cast offs

The filmmaker wanted to explore the idea of society’s unwanted — and, during development, he was also thinking about contemporary relevance as reproductive rights were being limited in Poland. “There’s a strong theme in this film that is the unwanted — unwanted people, unwanted children, the unwanted of society,” says von Horn. But the story is about more than one woman’s historical crimes: “It’s also about society, where it comes from — it’s not an isolated event.”

Von Horn started work on the visual style of the film with Dymek more than two years before the shoot. “We do a lot of image research, and this is inspiring because we’re not limited by budget or reality,” he says.

They created large “mind map” boards — featuring photos, images and key words — that showed some of the visual approaches to the characters, story arcs and themes. Some pictures came from books of architecture from industrial-era Glasgow or Manchester, and others from photographers Robert Frank, August Sander and Sergio Larrain.

Later cinematic inspirations included Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and especially David Lean’s Oliver Twist from 1948. Plus, one scene evokes the Lumiere brothers’ Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory from 1895.

The locations were scouted early so von Horn and Dymek could visit the buildings, mostly in small towns in southwest Poland, starting 18 months before filming began. “We didn’t always care about whether it was historically correct, if these window frames come from that time or those doorknobs or whatever,” continues the director. “It was more thinking, ‘Does this feel old? Does this feel dirty? Does this feel poor?’ We wanted to exaggerate things.”

Because of narrow streets and leaning buildings, and less modernisation than in Denmark, the exteriors in the Polish towns looked like the Copenhagen he had envisioned. A few key interiors were built in a studio “so we were free and could come up with whatever we wanted, especially for something like Dagmar’s candy store and her apartment”.

A team led by production designer Jagna Dobesz also built about 40-50 model buildings to use for some exterior shots — for example, when the real rooftops where they were shooting had been modernised.

For Karoline’s husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), who returns from war with a facial disfigurement and joins a freak show, von Horn and his team studied photos of facial surgery for wounded soldiers after the First World War — including one in which a doctor attempted to create a man’s new nose using one of his ribs — and also made a mask to cover half of Peter’s face, giving the character a furtive and rather sinister feel. “That prop creates a whole character,” says von Horn.

For Karoline’s costumes, designed by Malgorzata Fudala, the dresses had to show two worlds: the poverty she lived in and her dreams of becoming something more. The director sometimes pushed reality in all the crafts, encouraging hair and makeup teams to “add more sweat, more dirt on the face, the hands”.

Carmen Sonne and Dyrholm “loved those things — the more sweat and dirt, they more they feel the character.”

Wendy Mitchell

• Screen digital edition: November 29