Fractured localities: Imaginaries of the Kowloon Walled City in pre-handover Hong Kong cinema

Before its demolition in 1993, the Kowloon Walled City was a hyper-dense squatters’ enclave within British Hong Kong that was de jure under Chinese sovereignty. Distinct from the dystopian, cyberpunk visions it has inspired internationally (e.g. Blade Runner [Ridley Scott, 1982] and Ghost in the Shell [Mamoru Oshii, 1995]), the Walled City has been depicted in more familiar terms in local film productions. This article examines the Walled City’s significant and perennial role in Hong Kong’s cinematic and cultural imaginaries as a site of locality, where ideas and feelings about the city as a home are explored, shaped, and questioned. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s theorisations on the production of locality and applying them to two pre-handover films, Lam Nai-choi’s Brothers from the Walled City (1982) and Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law (1984), it develops the concept of the ‘Walled City imaginary’, where the enclave serves as a spatial construct for negotiating Hong Kong’s myriad sociopolitical contradictions and contestations, as well as ever-shifting ideas of what constitutes the ‘local’. Far from historical obsolescence, the Walled City and its cinematic imaginings continue to resonate amidst contemporary debates about local identity formation—arguably more than ever in post-2019 Hong Kong.