Echoes of the Rainbow and Wing Lee Street

ChinaRhyming is not known as a great fan of the cinema – occasionally good films come along but mostly these days it’s all trash served up to appeal to 15 year olds and vast amount of people older seem to put up with that – adults enthuse about child-level cartoons a lot I notice these days. So the multiplex is not our kind of place.

Until a film like Alex Law’s Echoes of the Rainbow comes along and magically recreates an era and a place. The film is a nostalgic and sentimental recreation of 1960s Hong Kong and its people (and their language – anti-Cantonese Canton politicians take note!). Well worth seeing and available on DVD I believe.

We also have Echoes of the Rainbow to thank for the preservation (for the time being) of Sheung Wan’s Wing Lee Street. Hong Kong’s decidedly dodgy Urban Renewal Authority (URA), who need watching closer than a child with matches, had planned to redevelop the area in mid-levels. The plan was not popular with many except, of course, Hong Kong’s iffy property developers who would redevelop the whole of Rome is given a half a chance into one big shopping mall. But apparently the success of the film (and an award at the Berlin Film Festival) helped put that plan on hold and Wing Lee Street survives.Originally the URA’s ‘plan’ was to preserve just three of the 12 tenements on the street.