Durian Durian

Watch for

• The two-part structure: watch how the meaning of Yan’s Hong Kong experience changes after the film relocates to northeastern China.
• Handheld camerawork and improvised-feeling street observation around Mong Kok, which keeps bodies pressed against commerce, traffic and cramped interiors.
• The friendship between Yan and young Fan, a relationship that cuts across age and circumstance without being sentimentalized.
• The durian motif itself—comic, violent and affectionate—used as both plot object and metaphor for a city that can repel and attract at the same time.

Production notes

Fruit Chan developed Durian Durian while scouting locations connected to Little Cheung, and the film retains that earlier project’s attention to marginal lives around Mong Kok. IFFR describes its handheld, improvised imagery and notes Chan’s use of non-professional performers to build a realistic portrait of Hong Kong and its contradictions with mainland China. Qin Hailu plays Yan, the northern woman working temporarily in the city, while Mak Wai-fan plays Fan, the young girl whose family is also precariously positioned in Hong Kong. The production crosses Cantonese and Mandarin and physically divides itself between the territory and the northeast. Durian Durian competed for the Golden Lion at Venice in 2000 and later received major Hong Kong recognition, including awards for screenplay and new performance. In 2026 M+ selected it as one of three new 4K restorations in the third phase of M+ Restored, explicitly framing the film as part of the creative legacy of Hong Kong’s New Wave and subsequent independent cinema.

Trivia

• Durian Durian competed for the Golden Lion at the 57th Venice International Film Festival in 2000.
• Fruit Chan developed the idea while looking for locations for Little Cheung, linking the film to his sustained interest in Mong Kok street life.
• The film is structured around two places: Hong Kong’s Portland Street area and northeastern mainland China.
• Qin Hailu’s performance became a major breakthrough; the film also received Hong Kong Film Awards recognition for screenplay and new performance.
• M+ completed a new 4K restoration of Durian Durian in 2026 as part of its M+ Restored program.

Legacy

Durian Durian is one of the key films for understanding what happened to Hong Kong independent cinema after the 1997 handover. Fruit Chan’s earlier work had made the handover generation visible through local youth and neighborhood life; here the perspective expands to the circular movement between mainland China and Hong Kong. The city is neither promised land nor simple victim. It is an economic machine capable of intimacy, exploitation, improvisation and reinvention, seen partly through people who do not possess secure status within it. That complexity has only grown more historically useful. The M+ restoration recognizes the film as part of a lineage connecting the New Wave’s formal and social ambitions to later independent work. Including both Made in Hong Kong and Durian Durian does not create redundant auteur concentration: the two films represent distinct historical moments and different relationships to territory, class and migration. Together they make Fruit Chan’s importance to post-handover cinema legible.