The Final Night of the Royal Hong Kong Police

The two parts (made three years apart, the first on film, the second on DV) of this modestly impressive indie feature add up to a mini-history of Hong Kong under the last 30 years of British colonial government. Both stories are set on the last night of British rule (30 June 1997), and both anchor their fictional material in documentary elements. Part 1 (One Body, Two Flags/Yi Ti Liang Qi) scans the life of a cop who dies tackling muggers and narrates from beyond the grave, juxtaposing his domestic troubles with the corruption scandals in the police; the episode uses amazing archive footage of the anti-British riots of 1967. Part 2 (The 5th/Mingyun Jiaoxiangqu - the title refers to Beethoven's Fifth, played by the cops to drown out pro-democracy demonstrators on 30 June) reflects Hong Kong's reaction to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 across the fraught relationship of an apolitical cop with his activist girlfriend. Necessarily tentative in its view of the future, the film worries that this history of dissidence and protest will be curtailed under China's sovereignty.