2K RESTORATION
SOUTHEAST ASIAN PREMIERE
Original title: 無人駕駛
Year: 2000
Director: Lawrence Ah Mon
Runtime: 90 minutes
Country: Hong Kong
Language: Cantonese with English subtitles
Rating: M18
Awards
FILMS OF MERIT
Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards 2000
Synopsis
Cookie (Debbie Tam Kit-Man) is a naive 13-year-old who hangs out with a rowdy group of teenage girls in Hong Kong. Their days consist of drinking, smoking, sleeping around, pulling schemes and getting into fights under the watch of absentee parents and ineffectual school teachers. Cookie suspects that she may be pregnant but finds out that her gangster boyfriend has left for Mong Kok to sell bootleg VCDs, leaving her alone to untangle the myriad of difficulties in her life.
Produced by Johnnie To, Lawrence Ah Mon’s Spacked Out is a Category III oddity within Hong Kong’s film landscape. The film is an unflinching look at the youth who have been shunned to the margins of a society, and highlights the uglier aspects of growing up often ignored by coming of age films. In the backdrop of all this is a viewing gallery of early aughts fashion and technology true to the environment the girls inhabit: a translucent, candy coloured world that barely obscures the film’s lingering darkness.
This film is part of the programme Y2K Dreamz. The full programme for Y2K DreamZ can be found here.
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