Begging

A seminal figure in Hong Kong’s experimental film movement of the 1960s and the College Cine Club, Law Kar pours the confusion and unrest that followed his political awakening after the 1967 riots into Begging. In a period of painful but growing clarity, the injustices of British colonial rule came sharply into view, and long-suppressed tensions felt by Chinese intellectuals surfaced as something raw and unavoidable. Starring Hong Kong’s first youth activist So Sau-chung, the film dissolves the boundary between art and lived experience. Political voicelessness and social marginalisation are rendered through the figure of the beggar, while sexual repression emerges as a metaphor for broader existential constraint. Taoist imagery threads through the film as a mode of endurance rather than resolution. Decades later, Law Kar returns to Begging to open his memoir documentary Cinema Strada, setting the restless intensity of his 30-year-old self against the calm, reflective distance of time.