Black san serif logo spelling out KANI with elongated circular eyes signifying crab eyes. Wavy contours are reminicent of the ocean. Kani Releasing logo designed by Leo Mak.

KANI007

Masashi Yamamoto

What's Up Connection

Japan

1990

120
minutes

Synopsis

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 Connection 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.

• An Interview With Director Masashi Yamamoto, Part II (22 mins, 2022)
• Interview with critic and filmmaker Shu Kei (14 mins, 2022)
• Interview with actor Tse Wai Kit & production manager Bill Yip (17 mins, 2022)
• Interview with assistant director Michael Wong (9 mins, 2022)
• New writing by Cheng Yu Shing
• Nova Alpha Credit Card* (*Not An Actual Credit Card)
• Japanese Theatrical Trailer
• Optional English, Chinese Subtitles

New cover by Connor Willumsen

Team

Contact

Inquiries: info@kani-releasing.com
Theatrical Bookings: theatrical@kani-releasing.com
Press: press@kani-releasing.com

Founded by Ariel Esteban Cayer & Pearl Chan
Theatrical Booking: Aaron Hunt
Logo Design: Leo Mak
Ident Theme: The Great Octopus
Distribution: OCN Distribution