Zuk seoi piu lau

Drifting is a heart-rending slice-of-life social drama about the lives of the homeless in Hong Kong, featuring great performances from Francis Ng, Tse Kwan Ho and Loletta Lee.

Fai, a drug addict released from prison, rejoins his homeless community living in the Sham Shui Po. One night, the community is raided by the police, disposing their personal property as garbage. Miss Ho, a social worker, helps bring their case to a court of law as the street sleepers rebuild wooden shacks under an overpass.

In his second film since 2018's Tracey, writer-director Jun Li draws an intimate portrait of the lives and predicament of homeless people, showing their life values and mindset.

Jun Li cleverly keeps the backstories of the homeless characters vague. It leaves a space for the audience to imagine what happened to them. It is also deliberately vague because their past probably isn't an elaborate entertaining tale of Greek tragedy. Your best guess is probably not far off.

At one point, Drifting directly comments on how the media's over-fascination with the homeless people's life stories and how social services struggle with helping the homeless effectively. Help is given with good intentions, but the help has to be the right kind and then that help has to be received.

Francis Ng gives a great performance as the lead character Fai. Fai speaks differently when he's speaking to other homeless people as opposed to normal citizens.

To the homeless, he speaks freely and colloquially. To the average non-homeless citizen, there's a delay in his speech. It is not a cognitive or mental processing delay, but a struggle of not knowing how to start talking. There's too much to explain to even begin and understanding seems so far away that nothing he can say has any hope of covering that distance.

This was a teensy detail but the effect was nuclear and effectively pulled me into the characters' mindsets. I felt the immense distance between the homeless and society.

Tse Kwan Ho also gave a moving performance as Master, a Vietnamese boat person who caught some bad luck and was left behind when his family saught asylum. Ho's performance showed how difficult it was for a homeless person to change their life and how having a normal life can be a terrifying thought.

Drifting is by no means an uplifting film, but it deals with its subject in a sincere and humane way that keeps it insightful and rewarding.

The story is quite heartbreaking. The scene that impacts me the most is when Fai explains why they have to treat the first "meal". This film really highlights the desperate situation of the marginalised, whom are completely left behind and forgotten by almost every one in the society.

This film begins with a middle-aged man named "Fai" (Frances Ng) being released from prison after spending a number of years behind bars. Since he has no family and no source of employment, he has no choice but to find a way to make ends meet there on the bustling sidewalks of Hong Kong. Yet, despite all of the pain and adversity he has suffered, he still manages to find a few other homeless people around him that offer some comfort to him when nobody else seems to care. But as bad as things are for him, things get even worse one morning when employees from the sanitation department come along and take all of his meager possessions without warning. However, rather than simply accepting serious breach in protocol, he and his friends are convinced by a local social worker named "Ms. Ho" (Cecilia Choi) to file a civil suit against City Hall to try to gain some modicum of compensation. Unfortunately, until a verdict is finally reached, they all will have to try to survive somehow any way they can. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I had no knowledge of this film until I recently stumbled across a review of it and decided to check it out. That being said, I have to agree that it was a departure from most films made in Hong Kong in that it contained a deeper and more intense storyline than usual. Admittedly, I have no real knowledge of the homeless situation there and for that reason I cannot say whether this film adequately captures the plight of these people or not. But even so, this is still a gripping movie experience and I recommend it to viewers looking for a film of this kind.

"In DRIFTING, Francis Ng play Brother Fai, a hophead fresh out of the joint, barely ekes out his existence with other unfortunates, huddled together in jerrybuilt wooden huts in the poorest area of the city. Jun Li is tight-lipped to reveal Fai's misfortunes (as a defiance against sensationalism), who is dismally alone, no home, no family, we only get wind that he has lost a son (the cause of death is moot), and this bereavement is allayed when he becomes pally with a young, vocally-challenged runaway Muk (Or), their father-son rapport undergirds the emotional weight of the film, near the end, Li even conjures up a case of prosopopoeia to plead for Fai's utter dejection and drug-addled taedium vitae."

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore. Thanks.

After Rotterdam, it was brushed twice on the big screen. To be honest, putting this film in the first youth film exhibition was quite a dimensionality reduction blow. Whether it is perspective, completion, theme, or performance, they are the leaders in Hong Kong films and even young directors' works this year. Er brush noticed more details missed because of English subtitles. For example, Huige named the harmonica boy amu because it used to be his son's name, and their feelings were more effectively explained; Another example is the Saigon identity of the "master", which has a deeper meaning when connected with the political background. Although this is an angry film, it is interpreted in a most powerless and sad state, which may be the living state and psychology of many Hong Kong people at present. Therefore, this is not only a human film that pays attention to the bottom people, but also a film full of expression and wants to make a voice for more people. The scene where Xie Junhao and his son met again in front of the video will still burst into tears even if you watch it again.