SPACKED OUT (2000)
Director: Lawrence Ah Mon
Starring: Debbie Tam, Christy Cheung, Angela Au, Maggie Poon
91 minutes, color, 35mm
in Cantonese with English subtitles

"We chose Tuen Mun because it's far from the city and it's isolated. It feels like an island. The kids there, especially new immigrants, look at themselves in ways very different from city kids. They feel trapped." - Lawrence Ah Mon

In the ‘70s, Hong Kong's misguided urban development division built huge housing blocks, complete with schools, playgrounds and malls, out in the New Territories, away from central Hong Kong in order to lower the city's urban density stats. The experiment was a total failure: the infrastructure was faulty and crumbling, the housing estates were hours away from Hong Kong where most of the parents worked, crime ran rampant, and schools became holding pens for kids who sniffed glue like maniacs to escape the boredom of their stifling little nowhere worlds.

Spacked Out is filmed in one of these sterile New Towns, Tuen Mun to be exact, and it follows four schoolgirls ­ Cookie, Banana, Bean Curd, and Sissy ­ through a few days in their lives as they hang out in tacky shopping malls, get high, go to parties, and cut other girls and themselves with box cutters all under the watchful eyes of the Sanrio pantheon — ­ Hello Kitty, Bad Batz Maru, all the lovable cartoon characters that bring joy and cuteness to every young girl's life. But Hello Kitty's never seen kids like this. Banana makes phone sex calls on her cell phone during class, Bean Curd and Sissy are lovers engaged in a tumultuous relationship that swings like a manic depressive. Cookie's best friend is being sent to reform school and, desperate for human contact, she calls late night radio shows, grasping at some kind of human contact, drowning in the misery and boredom of her own life. This movie reeks of lives on hold, wasted hours turning into wasted lives, hit-and-run sex, and all the self-mutilation, self-loathing, and self-importance of adolescence.

English title taken from an Australian expression, Chinese title taken from a popular radio call-in show literally meaning "no one driving," Spacked Out could be the ultimate "youth gone wild" movie, breathing a welcome humanity into the standard moralizing of the genre. Shot in a neckbreaking 14 days with a combination of actors and non-actors, this is Lawrence Ah Mon's excruciatingly beautiful lament for a world where 13 year olds are already adults, and where childhoods become shorter and shorter each year.

Spacked Out is Lawrence Ah Mon’s first film in five years, and more than any other director working today, he brings the ecstasy and misery of the blue collar world to the screen without trivializing his characters or trumpeting his own self-importance as the elder filmmaker shaking his head sadly at their lives. It's a tragedy he's been away for so long, but it's an absolute joy to see him come back.