Autumn Moon, a high-school drop-out and triad hopeful, works as a debt collector for the local gang. He spends his days running around labyrinthine housing complexes, harassing tenants for money, zipping through market stalls and beating opposing thugs with suckling pigs. On his walls, posters of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and Luc Besson’s The Professional (1994) give us an idea of his heroic aspirations and DIY ethics. His father has flown the coop and started his life anew with a mistress and her kid. Meanwhile, his mother is growing increasingly irritated at her son’s ungovernable attitude. No matter. Moon elects a new family and takes on the role of big brother to Sylvester (“no Stallone”), a boy with a mental disability whose prospects are equally slim. The two teenagers soon cross path with Ping, a public housing neighbor with a terminal kidney disease, and Susan, a ghostly figure whose bloodstained suicide letters become an object of fascination for the living teens. Fated to disappear, whether at the hands of gang violence, disease or failing mental health, the four characters become emblematic of the systemic violence and inequality that targets the poor. “Everyone has a story to tell,” observes Moon, and it might as well be Chan’s motto: to tell of Hong Kong as it is, in the moment, away from the cozy filmmaking establishment of its boom years. Gone are the rose-tinted glasses: here is public housing living, captured with a fly-on-the-wall authenticity. Neighbors and social workers are seen coming in and out of the precariously divided, gritty apartments, whether to borrow soy sauce, offer advice, or do what nosey neighbors do in the name of community. “Poverty begets evil,” says Autumn’s mother. However, these characters are not evil: simply products of circumstance, of societal and historical forces pressing down.

Death and a bitter sense of predestination informs the entire film. As Moon, Ping and Sylvester move closer to their fate, this affectation develops, quite beautifully, into a tragic and lucid worldview. Frequent cutting to light flares punctuates the film with dazzling, sweaty bursts of color, no doubt a side-effect from the second-hand celluloid the film was shot on. As a result, a ghostly, ephemeral quality quickly permeates the picture itself, as the film’s themes of loss, despair and a clearheaded resignation come into sharp focus. Here is a youth ready to die, but not willing to give up the fight; wanting, if anything, to go out with a bang, and to taste life without oppression. (Or, as suggested by one of the film’s most striking, poetic images: mooncakes at the tip of a gun.) Soon enough, Moon graduates from words to fists, to knives and guns—glory not to be found at the end of it all. The schematic of the triad film is thoroughly subverted, and Chan’s coming-of-age morphs into a coming-to-death: an account of being, at the end of all things. “Death doesn’t necessarily require a lot of courage,” as Moon puts it himself. Fighting for the future, however, is a different matter.

And while the film’s nihilism could be decried—especially today, when the question of hope has become a vital part of facing the unraveling of the world—Made in Hong Kong remains a deeply affecting work. Hope is to be found in the beauty and frankness of its performances by non-professionals, in the link that develops between the three teens and their dead comrade and, finally, in the vitality with which they navigate life on the edge. Most importantly, the film endures as the pitch-perfect encapsulation of the Handover era’s zeitgeist. Narrated by the ghost of a “loser” rather than by a hero or a Wong Kar-wai-esque romantic loner, Made in Hong Kong captures a youthful angst about finding one’s place in the world, unmoored in time and unfixed in identity, at the mercy of an unknowable game of nations.