Beauty in chaos: Japanese hail Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City film exhibition

Exhibition a hit for fans enthralled by aesthetics, martial arts moves and nostalgia of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

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Fans can get a taste of the former walled city at the exhibition inside the Airside shopping centre in Kai Tak. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 12:00pm, 23 Feb 2025

Japanese visitors are among thousands of people caught up in a wave of nostalgia and flocking to an exhibition linked to the Hong Kong box office hit Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.

The martial arts action film set in the 1980s earned 100 million yen (US$666,900) in three weeks after opening in Japan on January 17, making it the highest-grossing Hong Kong film there in five years.

Directed by Soi Cheang Pou-soi and starring Louis Koo Tin-lok and Sammo Hung Kam-bo, the film follows a troubled mainland Chinese migrant caught between rival gangs in the Kowloon Walled City, a densely populated enclave notorious for illegal structures and criminal activities before it was torn down in the mid-1990s.

The blockbuster grossed HK$107 million (US$13.8 million) in Hong Kong after its release last year, putting it in third place among the best-performing locally made films of all time after last year’s A Guilty Conscience and 2023’s The Last Dance.

Since the middle of December, an immersive exhibition at the Airside shopping centre in Kai Tak, near the location of the original walled city, has brought the film sets to life, allowing visitors to get a feel for the enclave.

Japanese tourists were among the 180,000 people who have visited the exhibition since it opened on December 16, according to the Tourism Board, which is hoping more locally made films will boost overall arrival numbers.