Decolonization, Memory and Screen Connections: Kong Ngee Enterprise & Its Nanyang Trilogy

Grounded on primary sources, this paper aims at rediscovering the institutional networks, human links and "shared memory" of Hong Kong and Singapore within the multi-cultural environment of filmmaking and film consumption. To achieve this goal, it investigates the shared film heritage of Hong Kong and Singapore from the 1950s to the 1960s through the lens of a border-crossing, vertically integrated film enterprise—Kong Ngee—in its South China and Southeast Asian context. Situated in a critical and contested time and spaces, filmmakers of Kong Ngee not only created film products catering to the popular taste of the post-war baby boomers, they reacted and spoke to competing visions of city and nation-buildings in Asia after World War II. In particular, this paper will examine Kong Ngee’s film production and exhibition contexts through a close analysis of selected films (a set of movies known as the Nanyang Trilogy). It aims at relating the changes of these film practices (such as visual & spatial rhetoric, "memory selection", choice of genre, filming location, inter-city referencing, casting choices, narrative economy) with the post-war political, socioeconomic contexts in South China and Southeast Asia.