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This book focuses on Fruit Chan's film Made in Hong Kong (1997), a typical story of disaffected youth and the morbid trips they take. In the history of world cinema, the disaffected youth is a well-recognized trope used to illustrate symptoms of the problems of contemporary cities. Like other similar films, Made in Hong Kong is an indictment of a society where youth express their urban angst and disillusionment. While the “cruel tragedies of youth” are fundamental to any big city, they always embody local specificities. The youngsters' death trips allegorize the concluding chapter of British colonial history in Hong Kong. It is this allegorical reference to the 1997 handover that places the film in the category of “New Hong Kong Cinema.”

This chapter attempts to examine the ethical relationship between self and other by way of focusing on the theme of estrangement in the New Hong Kong Cinema. In his study of the voice-over in cinema, Michel Chion creates a category of “acousmatic voices” or in French the acousmêtre. The acousmêtre refers to the image-voice relation in which one does not see the person one hears. Chion observes that sound film began with visualized sound but very soon it tried to experiment with acousmatic sound—voices without images, or voices divorced from images. These are not the voices of the disembodied, detached voice-over like that of documentary films because they have no personal stake in the film. This area of research has filled a lacuna in the study of cinema because the voice has often been considered as an inseparable and natural part of the image and thus it has seldom been examined as an independent category.

The Infernal Affairs trilogy provides the illusion of an epic sweep (from 1991–2003) that covers the issues of government legitimacy, global capitalist expansion, individual alienation, and the implosion of a system that blurs “legitimate” political authority with an underground “illegitimate” economic reality. As part of the New Hong Kong Cinema Series, this short book attempts to highlight the significance of Infernal Affairs within the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema as well as within global film culture by examining all three films in the trilogy. This analysis of Infernal Affairs concludes with a look at the trilogy's self-reflexive allusions to the mass media and the current state of Hong Kong film culture within a global context. In particular, the Infernal Affairs and the New Wave are discussed.

This chapter asks, with specific reference to Hong Kong, whether a national cinema can be produced in the absence of a nation-state. Comparisons with Palestinian cinema, which is disconnected from an independent nation state, help to shed light on the specificities of the New Hong Kong Cinema and its relation to the phenomenon of national cinema. Films by Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, Fruit Chan, Alan Mak and Andrew Lau are shown to reflect thoughtfully on Hong Kong's re-inscription into China following the Handover in 1997.