Amphetamine
Is true love possible for those who are incapable but so desiring of it?
97'
Hong Kong
IFFR 2024
Sexuality, suppressed emotion and urban alienation occupy the minds of the Hong Kong baseball team, searching for their place in a city where baseball culture is non-existent. Who are these invisible players if no one is cheering them on?
Stripping bare the cast of real athletes, City Without Baseball is a postmodern youth drama and a sports film, that plays cheekily with each genre’s iconographies. The handsome and charismatic protagonists play alongside camaraderie, crushes, love, competition and homoeroticism that seep beyond the locker room in a strikingly bare manner that marks a new approach to queer films in Hong Kong.
Co-directed by Lawrence Lau Kwok-Cheong, Scud’s directorial debut invites viewers to reflect on the complexities of human relationships, as well as the courage required to break free from societal expectations. Laying out the blueprints for his later work, City Without Baseball blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary, and fictionalises the lives of the baseball players navigating the challenges of youth in the universal quest for acceptance in a society that so often sidelines individuality.
– kijA
Scud, Lawrence Lau Kwok-Cheong
IFFR 2024
Programme IFFR 2024
When reflecting on Scud’s body of work Louboutin’s “Heels are pleasure with pain,” comes to mind – the two permeate all his films. Audacious, passionate, cruel, loving and consistently stubborn, Scud strips his soul by stripping beautiful men, leaving them naked and vulnerable, wandering between the realms of absolute pleasure, sensual daydreams and nightmares. As well as pondering the meaning and value of life, death and thereafter. With Naked Nations – Tribe Hong Kong, the Hong Kong artist provocateur says his goodbye to filmmaking, leaving behind ten stand-alone films that form one relentless and singular work of art.
Did you know that Scud is also joining us for a Talk this year? Find out more via the button below.
Read more about this programmeIs true love possible for those who are incapable but so desiring of it?
97'
Hong Kong
IFFR 2024
Apostles reflect on the meaning and value of life by exploring myth, karma and death.
82'
Hong Kong
IFFR 2024
A camp and subversive mosaic of love, sex, death and defiance from Hongkongese provocateur Scud.
89'
Hong Kong
IFFR 2024