Before Dawn

Ah Po, aged 17, has been spoiled all his life by his mother, a nightclub dancer dumped by his father and a succession of other men. He considers himself straight but one night's service as a rent boy leaves him implicated in a series of murders of gay men - which are actually being carried out by the bent cop who is charged with investigating them. Fok's hysterical, barely coherent melodrama throws in everything from kitchen sink realism to forced-sodomy fantasies with fluttering doves but centres on the chasm between adults and kids. It had the distinction of being the first Hong Kong feature to imagine a gay sub-culture and broach the possibility of its protagonist's sexual ambivalence. There are no 'positive images', but the film was a cult favourite in underground gay circles in the unliberated '80s.