Expired - Ryan Kwanten (2021) - I-Feng Mansion, To Kwa Wan

I Feng Mansion has cropped up in quite a few places. In this film, it is supposed to be the rooftop above where Dr Bergman (Hugo Weaving) lives. Apparently, to make something a bit more futuristic, all you have to do is add some lights.

Hitman - Jet Li (1998) - P.K. Cafe, 93 Ma Tau Kok Road

Lo is keen to take on Fu as his gun-for-hire and takes him to a local cafe to test him out. He starts trouble by calling a obnoxious female patron a 八婆 (bak por - basically the Cantonese for "bitch") and then leaves Fu to sort out the mess he has just created. Funnily enough, PK (the name of the cafe) is also Cantonese shorthand for 仆街 (puk gaai), which literally means to "fall in the street" but also means "bastard" in Cantonese.

Anyway, it was a real place and its identification is a good example of how weird my memory can be sometimes. The iron window bars rang a bell in my head from years ago when I was looking up a Knock Off location and I remember visiting this location and seeing the same design. Lo-and-behold, this cafe was indeed the same place I remembered. Although it closed down many years ago and has since been renovated into a trendier, modern bar, the shop next door still appears to have the same window grills.

International Prostitution: Brigade criminelle - Jean-Louis Broust (1980) - Chatham Road North, To Kwa Wan

More street-level To Kwa Wan scenery as the car is now driving north along Chatham Road North close to Shan Si Street. The building with the red/yellow/white shop sign (top image) is Chat Ma Mansion. The odd looking newly cemented structure that veers into view in images 2 and 3 is one of the newly constructed uprights for the East Kowloon Corridor - the flyover that now runs above Chatham Road North. The buildings in the last image sit either side of Kai Ming Street and as far as I can tell all these buildings are still around (for the time being). This is actually the same point in the road where Ma Tau Wai Road suddenly becomes To Kwa Wan Road and is basically a block to the south of the last post.

International Prostitution: Brigade criminelle - Jean-Louis Broust (1980) - Chi Kiang Street, To Kwa Wan

More in-car POV shots as Dega and his newly attached captive are driven to the airport by the police. This particular shot below is looking along Chi Kiang Street. The view today looks surprisingly similar with the only real change being the demolition of the old tenements seen on the left hand side in the first couple of images. Actually, if you use that Streetview link to look at the older images, you'll notice those buildings were still around up until the 2016 images. On the right hand side is the Ma Tau Wan/To Kwa Wan Road Garden which now has the To Kwa Wan MTR exit D in the middle of it.

Desperate Mission - Germán Cobos (1965) - Olympic Avenue, To Kwa Wan

Next up we see the vehicles heading down Olympic Avenue. It can be a bit laborious poring over a mid-60s, black and white aerial map of Hong Kong to find a specific bend in a road but sometimes it pays off. Had my Chinese been any better I may have been able to decipher the blurry red characters on the white building on the left, but as it is I did it the hard way.

Anyway, this is the corner of Olympic Avenue as it turns east onto Sung Wong Toi Road, just past the Sung Wong Toi Garden. The white building is marked on the older maps as a "seasoning factory", but a little digging turned up the name of the Tien Chu Chemical factory. The company is famous for its MSG products as well as other things. The part of the building we can see below was the cold storage facility at 72 Pak Tai Street, but the factory compound was massive (200,000 sq ft) and encompassed a whole block that has since been filled by the "Sky Tower"residential development.

The Confidence Man JP: The Movie - Masami Nagasawa (2019) - I-Feng Mansions, To Kwa Wan

I mentioned how I thought the crew behind The Confidence Man JP: The Movie might have copied Transformers: Age of Extinction, and here's why: the rooftop scenes supposedly based above the gang's hostel HQ in Quarry Bay, were actually shot at I-Feng Mansions in To Kwa Wan.This is the exact same building rooftop used by Michael Baye for the Transformer's shoot. Weird eh? It wouldn't surprise me if the two films used the same or similar local crews, either that or someone from the HK shoot had read my old blog posts about the rooftop switcheroo that Baye pulled in Transformers.

Police Story 2 - Jackie Chan (1988) - East Kowloon Corridor, To Kwa Wan

As the cars make their way north along the Kowloon City Road section of the East Kowloon Corridor, we can see the circular apertures of the To Kwa Wan Market building on the right side of the screen. This means the cars are just passing over Lok Shan Road.

Asia-Pol Secret Service - Wang Yu (1966) - Ma Tau Wai Road, To Kwa Wan

The next scene shows the pair being followed up Ma Tau Wai Road by someone in another car. In terms of realistic geography this is quite good for a film because the previous shot of the Fat Kwong Street Flyover is just back down the road a short way. 

At the far end of the road is one of the blocks for the Ma Tau Wai Govt housing Estate but before that, on the right hand side, you can see the building that is now (and may have been back then) the S.K.H Good Shepherd Primary School at the junction with Lok Shan Road. The only change here of late is that a new MTR station has been constructed and the main exit is now in a small low block in front of the school.

Les Nuits Rouges du Bourreau de Jade - Carrie Ng (2010) - Maidstone Road, To Kwa Wan

After being given details of how to make contact with her buyer, Catherine heads to a factory building (id not done yet) and is then shot and the merchandise is stolen by Carrie Ng's character. Catherine stumbles out of the building and onto a street and manages to identify the culprit by recognising the shoes that were outside the room. Although I haven't yet identified the factory building, it most definitely was/is not next to Maidstone Road in To Kwa Wan which is where the subsequent street scene was filmed.

Dead or Alive: Final - Shô Aikawa (2002) - Mei King Mansion, To Kwa Wan

For that gritty future Yokohama look, the director went to a location that has been seen quite a bit on films in this blog: Mei King Mansion.

Snowden - Joseph Gordon-Levitt (2016) - Mei King Mansion, To Kwa Wan

We've seen this part of To Kwa Wan several times now. It was last seen here when I was finding Ghost in the Shell locations, and is just a short hop from one of the large buildings used in the Transformers movie.

In this movie it is the location where Snowden's refugee protectors are living. Snowden was famously sheltered by various families throughout his stay here, all of which were refugee asylum seekers who risked their lives and futures to provide him a hiding place. They were all clients of the Human Rights lawyer, Robert Tibbo (played by Ben Chaplin), who has since been effectively forced out of the territory (recent NYT article here). Coincidentally, it seems that all of the people/families who helped shelter Snowden have had their applications for asylum denied - in this modern age of HK Govt pettiness, it seems they are paying the price for highlighting HK's refugee problems to the world.

Yellowthread Street (TV Series) - Bruce Payne (1990) - I Feng Mansion, To Kwa Wan

Another discovery from looking again at Yellowthread Street has revealed this location from the sixth episode, Fan Tan Man. It's I Feng Mansion in To Kwa Wan and by the looks at it we are looking through the gap between Blocks C and D towards the front of Mei King Mansion facing Lok Shan Road

Ghost in the Shell - Scarlett Johansson (2017) - Mei King Mansion, To Kwa Wan

Following the shootout scene when the sanitation workers are manipulated into attacking Dr Ouelet (Juliet Binoche), the surviving attacker boots up his camouflage jacket and parkours his way across various obstacles to escape. It's a scene that is an almost direct copy of one from the anime film version. A couple of the brief snippets from this scene were filmed over in To Kwa Wan at a building called Mei King Mansion and the road in front called Mei Kwong Street.

The last picture shows us looking back down towards Mei King mansion from Mei Kwong Street, with major running along the roof of Mei King Mansion.

Push - Chris Evans (2009) - I-Feng Mansion, To Kwa Wan

The residents of I-Feng Mansion in To Kwa Wan must be rubbing their hands together in anticipation whenever an overseas film company announces it will be filming in Hong Kong. We've seen this building twice before on this blog courtesy of Contagion and then Transformers. In Push, this is the building where Chris Evans' character is in hiding from "the department".