Starring Liu Kai Chi. In Cantonese and Mandarin, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Some seriously inside–Hong Kong stuff plays out in this collection of five shorts made by five very different directors drawing on the past while gazing roughly 10 years into the future of China’s most anglophonic “special administrative region”.

The tales range from ominously political—the black-and-white opener, from young director Chow Kwun-Wai, is like Tarantino as interpreted by Jim Jarmusch—to the playfully amusing, as in the brief visit with a cab driver who can’t keep up with changes in the language.

This segment, from Jevons Au, is where westerners learn that what we routinely refer to as Mandarin is called Putonghua by millions of mainlanders.

Also funny, in a somewhat darker way, is the closing short, called “Local Egg”, in which a long-time shopkeeper (TV veteran Liu Kai Chi) has a hard time keeping up with the shifting politics of how things are labelled—and with the creepiness of his own small son joining a uniformed spy squad. (This bit’s director, Ng Ka-Leung, also helped put together the whole package, which initially played on one screen in HK before doing very well there.)

Throughout, the visuals shift from vividly colourful to sombrely monochromatic, as in the artsiest and least successful entry, about a couple who play at being archaeologists after some unexplained upheaval.

But even the weaker parts add up to a deeper understanding of what’s happening over there, and the whole package is worth seeing as a smartly varied projection of anxieties regarding this unique city-state as it gets drawn further into the PRC fold.