What's Up Connection

When Hong Kong teenager Chi Gau Shin (Tse Wai Kit, School on Fire) wins a trip to Japan, he unleashes a chain of events that will soon bring him from the secluded fishing village of Po Toi O to Tokyo, by way of Kamagasaki – the so-called slums of Osaka. On the way, he connects with a barely competent tour guide named Kumi and the shapeshifting, loud-mouthed and loveable thief Akane. Upon returning home with this merry band of schemers, Gau Shin finds his family of resourceful counterfeiters on the verge of expropriation. A multinational conglomerate led by a ruthless Japanese developer has found the village, and is determined to raze it to build the new center of world trade!

Masashi Yamamoto one-ups Robinson's Garden (1987) with the go-for-broke ambition of What's Up Connection: a rare bilingual Japan-Hong Kong coproduction that unfolds as part unhinged globalization mini-epic, fringe documentary and portrait of a crazy family (the “Chi” of the Chi family a homonym for “crazy” in Cantonese). A breathless, kaleidoscopic evocation of a specific pan-Asian cultural experience as the 1990s drew near, What's Up has it all: Hongkongers looking to Japan for shopping and recreation; Japanese looking to Hong Kong for investment and opportunity – and the gangsters, hackers, thieves and Taoist priests stuck in-between it all. Scored by avant-garde trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, here is a lively film that bursts at the seams with possibility and brings Yamamoto’s project – of capturing beauty and resilience in the margins of capital – to its maximalist apex.

directed by: Masashi Yamamoto
starring: Tse Wai Kit,Reiko Arai
1990 / 120 min / 1.85:1 / Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0

Additional info:

• Region A Blu-ray
• An Interview with Director Masashi Yamamoto, Part II (22MIN, 2022)
• Interview with Critic and Filmmaker Shu Kei (14MINS, 2022)
• Interview with Actor Tse Wai Kit & Priduction Manager Bill Yip (17MINS, 2022)
• Interview with Assitant Director Michael Wong (9MINS, 2022)
• Booklet with New Writing By Cheng Yu Shing
• Nova Alpha Credit Card*
• Japanese Theatrical Trailer
• Optional English Subtitles
• Optional Chinese Subtitles
• New Cover Art by Connor Willumsen

Purchase Original Edition From Vinegar Syndrome.