General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Longest Summer

The Longest Summer (Chinese title 去年煙花特別多, literally "There Were Many Fireworks Last Year") is a 1998 Hong Kong drama film directed and written by Fruit Chan, about Chinese veterans of the British Army in Hong Kong who turn to crime after the force is disbanded ahead of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.¹^•² It is the second installment of Chan's handover trilogy, following Made in Hong Kong (1997) and preceding Little Cheung (1999).³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Fruit Chan (director, screenwriter, and editor)⁴
Year and place	Hong Kong, 1998; released there on December 31, 1998 (director's cut)⁵
Runtime and language	128 minutes, Cantonese, 35mm²^•⁴
Main cast	Tony Ho (Ga Yin), Sam Lee (Ga Suen), Jo Kuk (Jane)⁶
Producer	Andy Lau, whose company invested in the film⁴^•⁷
Music and cinematography	Kenneth Bi and Wah-Chuen Lam (music); Wah-Chuen Lam (photography)⁴
Recognition	2 wins and 12 nominations, including five Hong Kong Film Award nominations and a Film of Merit from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in the months around the handover of Hong Kong on July 1, 1997. In March 1997 the British disband the local Chinese military unit, the Hong Kong Military Service Corps, and Ga Yin, a sergeant in the Corps, and his fellow soldiers are left penniless and jobless.²^•⁴ Ga Yin finds work as a driver for a triad gang because his younger brother Ga Suen is already a member; then he and several unemployed mates decide to rob a bank.² The robbery goes wrong when they encounter another group of more violent robbers, but the men end up with the money anyway, with both police and gangsters on their trail.⁹^•²

The film contrasts two generations. Ga Yin, after a comfortable life in the army, feels like a lost child looking for a new identity, while his brother Ga Suen, thirteen years younger, embodies the new Hong Kong generation filled with enterprise but choosing the wrong way to make money quickly.¹⁰ In the ending, Ga Yin suffers a mental breakdown, mistakes a young gangster for his brother, and shoots the youth through the cheeks, an injury that explains the opening image of a subway passenger with a hole through his face; after a head wound and amnesia in a later fight, he "transitions" smoothly into the new society.¹¹^•¹²

Production

Shooting before the story. Chan began filming the handover ceremony and its preparations at the beginning of 1997, before the plot existed. The story came to him when he saw the People's Liberation Army arrive on the morning of July 1, which prompted him to ask whether Hong Kong, as a colony, had ever had an army of its own; it had only Chinese soldiers serving in the British military. His aim became to explore the identity crisis these soldiers faced during the transition.¹¹ Chan later said he wrote three scripts in 1997 and shot this film first because its screenplay was the most mature and because unemployment in Hong Kong was high in 1998, so that "last year's fireworks" would not become "that year's fireworks."¹³

Style. The film is shot to look like docu-drama and integrates documentary footage of the handover ceremonies and fireworks displays, giving it, in Time Out's view, a street authenticity rare in Hong Kong movies.² Compared with Made in Hong Kong, it has a more explicitly documentary style and more direct political content, using footage of the actual ceremonies to convey a sense of authenticity, although Chan has repeatedly downplayed any political agenda, saying he simply projected what was happening every day onto the big screen.¹⁴^•³ Two of the soldier roles were played by real ex-members of the Corps.²

Place in Chan's work

The Longest Summer is the middle film of Chan's 1997 trilogy, which examines daily life in Hong Kong around the return to Chinese sovereignty through the perspectives of youth (Made in Hong Kong), middle age (The Longest Summer), and childhood (Little Cheung).³^•¹⁵ Chan said he made it with commercial-film techniques because Andy Lau's company invested in it, and he later expressed mixed feelings about the result, though he acknowledged the film's poetic melancholy came from meeting the soldiers dismissed by the British.⁷

Release and reception

The film premiered in Hong Kong on December 31, 1998, and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 1999, followed by festival showings in Italy, the Czech Republic, and Austria.⁵ Its commercial release was limited: in 1999 it reached only a few European countries, including Germany, the Czech Republic, and France, and by 2000 only Taiwan and Japan had taken it theatrically in Asia.¹⁴

At the 1999 Hong Kong Film Awards it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Sam Lee), and Best New Performer (Tony Ho), among other categories, and the Hong Kong Film Critics Society gave it a Film of Merit award.⁸ The song "The Longest Summer," composed and written by Wah-Chuen Lam and performed by Andy Lau, was nominated for Best Original Film Song at the Golden Horse Film Festival.⁸ The film was also nominated for the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary and won the Reader Jury of the "Standard" prize at the Viennale.⁸ Contemporary Hong Kong critics were less generous with it than they had been with the low-budget Made in Hong Kong.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

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

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