What Hong Kong cinema can take away from a popular Chinese war film

In late August, I took my parents to see Once Upon a Time in the Middle East in their small-town cinema on the mainland. Built around an unnamed conflict widely understood to be the US-led Iraq war, the film has become the kind of phenomenon no marketing budget could buy, projected to reach 2.5 billion yuan (US$372.5 million) largely through word of mouth.

Its Hong Kong and overseas release will revive geopolitical arguments over a Chinese commercial film entering a narrative world long associated with American power and war. My parents offered another kind of review, which was neither about geopolitics nor historical responsibility. Their take was simply that any war brings immense suffering to ordinary people.

For 50 years, the Middle East had reached my parents largely as television news. The film gave those distant wars ordinary faces. They said little else on the drive home. I kept returning to a question from my research: why do some films travel across borders while others remain trapped by the expectations attached to where they were made?

I have heard the standard diagnosis of the decline of Hong Kong cinema: co-productions corroded the craft; filmmakers chased mainland money; the cure is to become more authentically Hong Kong, more local, more unmistakably ours. It all has the comfort of a familiar hymn.