What's Up Connection

Director: Masashi Yamamoto, Masashi Yamamoto, Masashi Yamamoto

1990 / 119min / DCP

Yamamoto’s cutting comedy looks at Japan through the eyes of outsider Chi Gau Shin (School on Fire’s Tse Wai-Kit), a visiting Hong Kong teenager whose family runs a counterfeiting business out of a hidden fishing hamlet. After winning a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun, Chi sets out on a journey that takes him to Tokyo and the Osaka slums, encountering new friends like the bumbling tour guide Kumi and the boisterous thief Akane. Returning to Hong Kong with his pals in tow, Chi finds that a Japanese developer has discovered his home village, and plans to bulldoze it and build a new global trade center in its place. Full of whiplash shifts of tone, Yamamoto’s genre pastiche is a devilishly entertaining David and Goliath story that romps its way towards revolution.