Secret in the Box, a historical thriller that recreates the 1974 Hong Kong Happy Valley Box murders, held a press conference at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, where director Frankie Tam Kwon Yuen and star Chan Song Wen discussed the true cold case that is the center of the Golden Cup final entry.
Directed by Hong Kong’s Frankie Tam, the film is about Hong Kong’s first murder case to be solved entirely by forensic evidence without eyewitness testimony. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the social atmosphere of Hong Kong in the 1970s and uses cold cases to investigate the dark undercurrents of human behavior.
Giving a fully Cantonese performance on screen for the first time, Chan plays a downtrodden man caught between conflicting realities. The actor stated that acting in Cantonese was essential to the authenticity of the role. “I believe that dialects, especially Cantonese, have a thousand-year history,” he said. “This story is set in Hong Kong. If we played a native Hong Konger only in Mandarin, it would be a mismatch. Having the dialect gives the audience a stronger sense of belief.”
Actor Patrick Tam, who worked with Chan for the first time, said the experience was something he had been waiting for for a long time. “I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time,” Tam said. “He’s really very talented.”
Frankie Tam said the editing process mirrored the act of criminal investigation, with each cut aimed at revealing answers hidden in the footage. Rather than try to find the guilty, the filmmakers chose to leave the question of truth open to viewers. “The debate over this case has never stopped in the past 50 years,” Tam said. “As we weighed the creative choices, we were unable to make a verdict and refused to provide a final answer. People often only believe what they want to believe, so we ended up taking a parallel universe approach and allowing the audience to choose which version of the truth they wanted to accept.”
