Mad World
Description
Movie characters suffering from mental illness are often portrayed in the extreme. They’re either saints (too good for this world) or sinners (wrestling with criminal urges). Neither is the case with Wong Chun’s first feature film Mad World, as the director quietly and perceptively tells the story of one man afflicted with bipolar disorder. Tung (Shawn Yue), once a successful stockbroker, has just been released from a sanitarium into his dad’s care. Long estranged from each other, father (Eric Tsang) and son try to reconcile their differences inside of a cramped urban apartment. Wong’s camera moves into their lives with the ease and effortlessness of the best realist filmmakers. Not only can the influence of the late Edward Yang (Yi Yi) be detected, but Yang’s frequent collaborator Elaine Jin plays Tung’s mother, a damaged woman who expends her emotional forces to shock and hurt those closest to her. Unlike her son, she’s simply unable to look at or contend with the demons that haunt her troubled soul. Jin’s startling performance recently won Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan. Wong, himself, won Best New Director there for a drama that thoughtfully attempts to de-stigmatize mental illness. —Jeffrey Edalatpour
Wong Chun’s first film, a 30-minute short entitled 6th March, dramatized the arrest of three protesters after a 2011 march in Hong Kong. It showed at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2013. Wong received the First Feature Film Initiative grant from Create Hong Kong to make his directorial feature-length debut Mad World. He went on to win Best New Director for the film at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan.
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/207678868?autoplay=1Film Details
Language Cantonese
Year 2017
Runtime 101
Country Hong Kong
Director Wong Chun
Producer Chiu Sung Kee, Heiward Mak
Writer Florence Chan
Editor Wong Chun
Cinematographer Zhang Ying
Music Yusuke Hatano
Cast Shawn Yue, Eric Tsang, Elaine Jin, Charmaine Fong