Grace Chang: Dreaming Hong Kong

Abstract

The 26th Hong Kong International Film Festival, in 2002, held a retrospective entitled ‘Back to Dreamland: Cathay Showcase’. This was followed by a retrospective, on show over the following couple of months at the Hong Kong Film Archive (as well as at other venues throughout the city and the New Territories) entitled ‘Back to Dreamland: Cathay Retrospective’. Eventually, a lengthy, handsome bi-lingual anthology was issued by the Film Archive, entitled The Cathay Story (Wong 2009). It is likely that few overseas visitors to the festival, especially younger and non-Chinese audience members, knew much, if anything, of Cathay Studios. A few pages in Stephen Teo’s Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (1997), and some sparkling pictures and effusive tribute in Paul Fonoroff’s far less well-known work, Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema 1920–1970 (1997) was pretty much the English language extent of the scholarship devoted to this once-prominent film-making concern before The Cathay Story appeared in print. The retrospective screenings of Cathay’s output held throughout the city drew an almost exclusively older audience, those who perhaps had seen the films upon their first release in the 1950s and 1960s. Otherwise, these films were only the province of Chinese speakers in Hong Kong or South East Asia, who had seen some of the films over the years on television.