Our Time Will Come (2017)

"See you after the victory!"

I often enjoy Ann Hui’s meditative style and Our Time Will Come was no exception. In this film her quiet introspection was focused on Hong Kong’s resistance movement in 1942 during the Japanese occupation.

Fong Lan (aka Fong Lam aka Fang Gu) lives with her mother. They have rented a room to a writer and his wife who have mentioned they will be moving out soon. What they don’t know is that Mao Dun (aka Mr. Shen) is working with the resistance to safely leave Hong Kong with other hunted intellectuals. Fong is called upon to help the Maos when their plans are disrupted. Blackie Lau (aka Liu Hei Zai) recruits her for their Urban Unit afterwards and soon Fong is delivering messages and printing flyers. Blackie Lau heads up the Firearms unit taking on dangerous and deadly missions. Fong’s ex-boyfriend works undercover at the Japanese surveillance office for General Yamaguchi. All three plus Fong’s mother do their part to hamper the Japanese wherever and whenever they can.

While the film did show the three-pronged attack on the Japanese, intelligence acquisition, guerilla attacks, and information sharing, much of the film centered on Fong Lan and her mother. Despite living in an occupied city filled with danger, especially for women, life went on. What little food they could grow or access had to be prepared and eaten, people still married, and when possible, people continued their businesses to earn a living. I could have watched the film with just these two women playing off of each other.

OTWC’s cast was loaded with quality actors. Deanie Ip gave a lovely and understated performance as Fong Lan’s mother. Mother Fong worried for her daughter, assisted where she could, reacted fairly nonplussed when stumbling upon a body, and stood tall in the face of death. Zhou Xun’s Fong Lan grew from a bunny loving young woman to one who courted death daily as a member of the resistance. Eddie Peng was at his charismatic best as Blackie Lau providing the film with a few lighthearted moments. Wallace Huo’s Lee Gam Wing was as expected suave and cool as ice. Pau Hei Ching showed up briefly as Fong’s aunt at a wedding with a rationed budget and one where the silverware was counted when the guests left.

Our Time Will Come was a well-crafted film. The cinematography was lush and saturated, the framing and composition of shots-gorgeous. Recently I watched a film that looked like it had been shot on a cell phone while riding in the back of a truck on a gravel road making this film’s quality seem even finer. Stories of the different cells and characters unfolded slowly though all were interwoven in mission and sentiment. True to war, the fighters had successes and failures, lives were saved and lost. Films such as this can overly rely on in-your-face patriotism and heavy melodrama. Hui managed to avoid these tropes while also showing people working together from the young to the old, women and men alike, to protect their home and neighbors from the horror all around them. OTWC was not filled with fingernail biting suspense or heart pounding action yet it was compelling all the same.

"The wind which carried the rays of the setting sun has died down. It's as if it melted away...Night's black curtain is falling, but glimmers of light remain..."


16 September 2025

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