Hong Kong has its fair share of iconic actors and actresses, but the biggest screen star of all is right under our feet. In the most memorable Hong Kong films, it’s the city itself that deserves top billing, and Hong Kong filmmakers are wise to capitalise on our greatest asset.

The result is a place where the urban and cinematic fabrics are so interwoven, it’s sometimes hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. We’ve all had a few life-imitates-film moments (try walking out of One Night in Mong Kok into actual Mong Kok and you’ll see what I mean), and certain neighbourhoods and landmarks are so frequently used that they risk becoming visual clichés. Others are so completely defined by one work that they become invisible (at least on the big screen) for some time.

One of these places is Tsim Sha Tsui’s Chungking Mansions, which has been surprisingly under-utilised since Wong Kar-wai made it an icon in the mid-90s. In Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, Wong looped his narrative strands through the labyrinthine hallways and cramped guesthouses of 36-44 Nathan Road, forever imprinting it upon the brains of international cinephiles. I was one of them, and my experience seeing Chungking Express in high school kick-started a passion for Hong Kong movies, and later Hong Kong itself.

When I moved here, a decade after the release of Express, I was curious to see how the real-life Mansions compared to the one glimpsed through Christopher Doyle’s hazy wide-angle lens. In short: quite different. Chungking now attracts a racially diverse mix of people, including a healthy contingent from Africa, and is considerably safer thanks to increased CCTV coverage. After exploring a changed Chungking, I began to think the location was due for a second look through the view-finder. At least a quick and dirty one.

Which is how, in recent weeks, I ended up haunting the hallways and guesthouses of Chungking with a boom mic and an eye out for the security guard. My partner and I plunged into this project, an experimental short documentary (to call it “indie” would be glamorising it), with both feet, and it’s unclear as of press time if we will emerge in one piece. Not because of any real danger (although there were a few moments where it seemed an unnamed government’s consulate wished to steal our camera and/or tapes). We made it through this, and the heat, and the rain, and the difficulty of trying to do pedestrian-control in a place that’s constantly like MTR at rush hour. But we have found, to our frustration (and, in our more zen moments, delight), that truth is always stranger than fiction, and the end of the story is still writing itself.

The nice news is that Chungking Mansions was always ready for a close-up. In some ways, Hong Kong’s iconic locations are the most reliable actors around.

In case you’d like to revisit a classic in a new form, the Criterion Collection recently announced they’ll be releasing Chungking Express on Blu-Ray sometime in October of this year. Go ahead, you deserve another (ahem, legal) copy. Samantha Culp