Choy Ji Talks Shifting Hong Kong-Mainland China Ties In Cross-Border Drama ‘Borrowed Time’ – Pingyao

Liz Shackleton
·7 min read
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Guangzhou-based director Choy Ji has filmed Hong Kong from a perspective we’ve rarely seen before in his debut feature Borrowed Time, which played at Pingyao film festival this week after screening in Busan’s New Currents competition.

Produced by Mo Jinjin and executive produced by Stanley Kwan, the Cantonese-language drama follows a young girl from Guangzhou (capital of China’s Guangdong province) who travels to Hong Kong to look for the father she hasn’t seen in 20 years – and who she knows has an entirely separate family on the other side of the border.

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During the visit, she bumps into an old acquaintance as a typhoon is closing in on the city and they embark on a fantastical journey together while spending the night in a rundown tenement apartment.

Apart from Hong Kong actor Tai Bo (Twilight’s Kiss), the cast of the film mostly comprises non-professional actors, including Lin Dongping playing the young girl. The film was written by Choy Ji’s long-time collaborator Wang Yin, with cinematography by Huang Shuli and art direction by Albert Poon Yick-sum and Li Xinhe.

Born in Chaozhou in Guangdong, Choy has previously directed short films Nature’s Kid (2012), Recalling (2013) and A Piece Of Time (2014). He is also an alumnus of Talents Tokyo. Deadline sat down with both Choy Ji and Mo Jinjin following the screening of their film in Pingyao.

DEADLINE: How did you start your career as a filmmaker?

CHOY JI: I studied journalism at university and wanted to be a reporter, but also made some short films that got me interested in filmmaking. I studied documentary filmmaking at Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing, then worked as a journalist in South China for one year before making some short documentaries.

MO JINJIN: That’s an important factor that has influenced his filmmaking – he started in documentary not fiction, so there’s an observational quality to his work.

DL: So why decide to make a fiction film as your debut feature? 

CJ: Because making documentaries takes such a long time. Before this film I was shooting a documentary in the Tibetan region for almost ten years. You don’t have any control as a documentary filmmaker – you have to wait for life to happen – so I started thinking fiction films would be a good way to express what I wanted to say. In 2013, I made a short fiction film on a very low budget that travelled to some festivals and that encouraged me a lot.

DL: Where did the idea for the story of this film come from? 

CJ: I researched the story with Wang Yin, a scriptwriter who is also from Guangdong, partly based on the experiences of somebody she knew. We went to Hong Kong together to do some research, then she wrote the script.

MJJ: We’ve always had these kinds of friends growing up in Guangdong – you’d never see their father, but you knew he was from Hong Kong. There are lots of cross-border stories like this.

CJ: The significance for me is that, growing up in Guangdong in the 90s, we were deeply influenced by Hong Kong music, movies and culture and were in awe of relatives who came to visit us from Hong Kong. At that time, the economy in mainland China was nowhere near as strong as in Hong Kong – so we saw it as this magical place, although there was still a boundary between us and we didn’t feel that close.

Over the years, that perception has changed – it’s easier to visit Hong Kong and our economy has caught up, so the mystery has faded a bit, but it still has special meaning for us. I wanted to capture all those feelings but do it through the story of a family. Not so many Chinese films look at Hong Kong from the perspective of people living on the mainland, so I wanted to explore that relationship.

DL: How did you finance the film? 

MJJ: We raised some finance in late 2019, but when the pandemic happened the investors pulled out, because all the cinemas were closed and they didn’t have enough confidence to back an arthouse film from a new director. In the end, all the investment came from friends and family.

CJ: We were waiting for Covid to be over so we could starting raising new investment, but in 2021 it felt like the pandemic was never going to end, so in summer 2021 we decided to just go for it. It was quite difficult because both sides of the border still had quarantine requirements for a few weeks, so we had to use a separate crew in Hong Kong.

DL: How did you time the shoot to coincide with what is obviously a very real typhoon in Hong Kong?

MJJ: We just sat and waited for the typhoon to come! We went through quarantine in Hong Kong and filmed everything else that we needed, then waited for a typhoon for nearly two months. Our executive producer [award-winning director-producer Stanley Kwan] was really worried because we were getting into October and typhoons don’t usually come that late. But then two hit Hong Kong one after the other and gave us all the footage that we needed.

CJ: I guess my training as a documentary filmmaker gave me the patience to wait that long.

DL: Obviously, there have been a lot of political changes in Hong Kong over the past few years. Were you also interested in exploring that side of the relationship between China and Hong Kong? 

CJ: I wanted to tell a story about Hong Kong from the perspective of someone who has been deeply influenced by it, but at the same time never really been close to it. So it’s more a story about societal changes, and how the experiences of one family are a reflection of those changes, rather than a political story. As a filmmaker, I think the best way forward creatively is to focus on the characters and give the audience space to think about the bigger picture behind those characters. It’s been 20 years since this girl has seen her father, and in the meantime, there have been many changes in society in both Guangdong and Hong Kong.

DL: There’s a lot of magical realism in the film, including a whole sequence involving an indigenous tribal group, which is not what we expect from a documentary filmmaker. Why did you decide to take that route? 

CJ: After years of focusing on documentaries, and making films about the real world, I wanted to do something different and explore other states like memory, dreams, imagination and spirituality. We can put all that inside a narrative and let the audience decide what is a dream and what is reality. The tribe in the film in based on a real tribe in Malaysia that the scriptwriter has researched extensively. Initially, we planned to shoot that sequence in Malaysia, but we couldn’t travel due to the pandemic, so we shot the jungle scenes in Hong Kong.

DL: What’s your next project – are you making a doc or staying with fiction? 

CJ: First of all, I really want to finish the documentary I was making in Tibet, so I’m currently working on the editing. But I also want to continue making fiction films set in the south. In China, the film industry is based in Beijing and most stories are about life in northern China, but the culture between north and south is very different. For that reason, I want to stay in Guangzhou, and I’ll fly to Beijing to meet producers and investors if I need to, but I don’t want to lose my emotional connection to the south.

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