A rare Hong Kong foray into sports cinema arrives in
Weeds on Fire, an energetic little picture inspired by the true 1980s story of the city’s first Chinese youth baseball team. Back then, like it is now, baseball was a fringe activity in Hong Kong, as the film makes clear in opening scenes when principal Lo Kwong-fai (Liu Kai-chi) seeks funds to start a team at his school in the Sha Tin district.
After winning over sceptics and getting the green light, Lo assembles a squad of underachievers in hopes that teamwork and discipline could turn the teens’ lives around.
Early training sessions are a mess, yet soon enough the lads have a uniform and a name: the Shatin Martins. The first game is a disaster when the Martins are thrashed by a visiting Taiwan little league team made up of what look like primary school kids. But the loss of face sparks a turnaround for the team, and after one player drops out in a huff they get on track to reach for success.
Through it all, first-time director Chan Chi-fat places the focus on two team members – long-time friends and public housing neighbours Tse Chi-lung (Lam Yiu-sing) and Fan Chun-wai (Tony Wu) – and builds up new stories around them. (The extent of dramatisation is clear from the film’s closing tributes, which note that the real Lo Kwong-fai assembled the Shatin Martins at a primary school.)
Tse has a dire home life and lacks confidence while Fan is prone to finding trouble, and with material like teen crushes, youth pregnancy and juvenile delinquency also turning up, albeit somewhat heavy-handedly at times, Weeds on Fire develops an undercurrent of coming-of-age drama.
Most viewers, however, will be heading into theatres for the baseball, and it’s there that Chan’s film holds well to sports-movie genre staples. Weeds on Fire delivers a crowd-pleasing tale of plucky underdogs, complete with entertaining training scenes and players striving to triumph against the odds.
The team’s field of dreams is merely a weed-ridden covered reservoir, but on it the filmmakers capture games with a great energy and accompany them with a rousing score. The sport is even explained to non-fans through peppy animation.
And at the end Weeds on Fire applies messages to wider life when, amid scenes of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy occupy protests of late 2014, an older Tse Chi-lung reflects on his experiences in the ‘80s.
Remarkably, Chan Chi-fat and his collaborators, many of them emerging talents plus a few industry veterans like co-producers Chan Hing-kai and O Sing-pui, pulled off compelling filmmaking on an unusually tight budget.
Weeds on Fire is the first finished work to come out of the government-run First Feature Film Initiative, in which teams with first-time feature directors vie for public funding by entering production proposals and screenplays into a competition. Chan’s project was picked in late 2013, winning funding of $2 million (around 226,000 euros) to fully cover film production and sales.
The finished feature holds imperfections that may be expected of low-budget work from a first-time director, but for the most part the filmmakers manage to conceal budget constraint as the story zips along with quality casting and sleek production values.
By balancing an effective mix of sport scenes and youth drama, plus touches of nostalgia too, Weeds on Fire showcases how Hong Kong film talents – young and old – can make nimble use of limited resources as they steer local cinema into uncommon directions.