General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Hollywood Hong Kong (香港有个荷里活)

Hollywood Hong Kong (香港有個荷里活) is a 2001 Hong Kong black comedy film directed, written, and edited by Fruit Chan, set in Tai Hom Village (大磡村) at Diamond Hill, Hong Kong's last shantytown, as its residents face demolition under a redevelopment plan¹^•². It is the second part of Chan's "Prostitute Trilogy", between Durian Durian (2000) and Three Husbands (2018)¹, and it competed in the main competition at the 58th Venice International Film Festival in 2001³.

Key fact	Detail
Director and year	Fruit Chan, 2001; he also wrote the screenplay²
Setting	Tai Hom Village, Diamond Hill, a shantytown slated for demolition, beside the new Plaza Hollywood apartment and shopping complex¹
Trilogy position	Second of the "Prostitute Trilogy": Durian Durian (2000), Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), Three Husbands (2018)¹
Lead cast	Zhou Xun as Tung Tung, a Shanghai prostitute; Glen Chin as the pork-shop father; Wong Yau-Nam as the young pimp Wong Chi-Keung²^•⁴
Production	France, Hong Kong, and Japan co-production; cinematography by O Sing-Pui, music by Lam Wah-Chuen⁵
Festival and awards	In competition at the 58th Venice International Film Festival (2001); Golden Horse Award for Best Director in 2002³^•⁶
Runtime	Listed as 105 minutes by the Rotterdam festival, 108 minutes by other sources, and 102 minutes for the Taiwan release²^•⁵^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The story takes place in Tai Hom Village, a shantytown of cramped wooden houses at Diamond Hill that was, in real life, Hong Kong's last shantytown and was demolished not long after the film was made⁷^•¹. Facing the village stands the newly built Plaza Hollywood, a luxury apartment and shopping complex whose name gives the film its title¹.

The Chu family, a father and his two sons, runs a barbecue pork shop in the village; all three are heavily overweight². A young woman from Shanghai, Tung Tung (Zhou Xun), moves into the Hollywood complex and repeatedly visits the stall to eat pork². She seduces, in turn, Wong Chi-Keung (Wong Yau-Nam), an eighteen-year-old self-styled pimp who first meets her through the internet, then the elder Chu son, and finally the father²^•⁴. She uses several aliases, including Hung Hung and Fong Fong, and tells the youngest son that although she lives in Hollywood, her dream is to reach the real Hollywood²^•⁷.

The tone shifts when a lawyer's letters arrive threatening the men with prosecution for sex with an underage girl unless they pay large sums; the light romantic register turns to absurdism, human meat appears on the pork stall, and gangsters cut off a hand from each of two young men, which are then sewn back on incorrectly²^•³. Recurring images include the family's sow, named Mama, who disappears when Tung Tung arrives and returns, after she leaves, covered in printed characters, and a mainland doctor who attempts to implant a human embryo in a pig⁶.

Place in Fruit Chan's work

Fruit Chan, born in 1959 on Hainan and raised in Hong Kong from age ten, became known for low-budget independent films using non-professional actors to portray grassroots life¹. After his "1997 Trilogy" of Made in Hong Kong, The Longest Summer, and Little Cheung, he built the "Prostitute Trilogy" on collisions between mainland newcomers and Hong Kong's lower classes, moving from realism toward the magical and the grotesque¹. Hollywood Hong Kong marks a deliberate break from the documentary-style realism of his earlier films; the Taipei Times described it as his most dramatic and perhaps his most meticulously designed film to that point, employing a star-studded cast⁷.

The title carries a double meaning. The village and its surroundings had reportedly once been a base of Hong Kong film production, and the Plaza Hollywood towers over its ruins; critics read the film as a metaphor for Hong Kong filmmakers' anxious attraction to Hollywood and for the city's economic displacement by Shanghai after the handover⁶^•⁸.

Style and reception

Screen's review at Venice called the film a tender black comedy set in Hong Kong's last shantytown, blending the sentimental and the grotesque with social realism, and predicted cult success on the arthouse circuit⁸. Film Threat described it as a rich, sometimes grotesque tale that works on both a cerebral level, examining the economic climate after the handover, and a sensual one, with close-ups of sliced pork and montages of sexual encounters⁹.

Critics singled out Chan's visual style. In a rusted, crowded, squalid setting, Zhou Xun's red-dressed heroine on a swing becomes a projection of the family's desire to escape their environment; the reviewer Pu Feng, writing in the Hong Kong Economic Journal, called this a rare display of visual expressiveness and noted that the whole village functions as a character in the film¹⁰. The M+ museum's program notes describe the village as a dark, damp, rust-filled labyrinth set against the glossy Plaza Hollywood, a sharply contrasted heterotopia (A real space that is 'other': an in-between, contrasting world within a place), and observe that although the shantytown could not escape demolition, the film preserves its former appearance¹.

Awards

At the 39th Golden Horse Film Awards in 2002, the film received 14 nominations, one more than Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but won 3 awards: Best Director for Fruit Chan, Best Makeup and Costume Design for Jesse Dai, and Best Sound Effects for Liu Ka-Man⁶^•⁴. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Glen Chin), Best Actress (Zhou Xun), Best Screenplay, and Best New Performer (Wong Yau-Nam)⁴. At the 22nd Hong Kong Film Awards it received nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay⁴. The film screened in the main competition at Venice in 2001 and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2002³^•².

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026