Distance 距離

About the Film

Distance is set inside a very specific Hong Kong reality, a father working night shifts as a security guard in high rises he’ll never really live inside the way the residents do, and a son a generation removed from that survival mindset, drawn instead toward an art school ambition his father has no real framework for supporting. The gap between them is generational as much as it is personal, one man who came up believing stability meant showing up and working the hours, and one kid coming of age in a city where that’s no longer enough to feel secure, or even necessarily the point. None of it is anyone’s fault exactly, which is what makes it quietly devastating, a father and son worn down by circumstances neither of them chose into people who can barely find the time to see each other. The ending doesn’t resolve any of that so much as close the gap by a few inches, which felt like the more honest ending to write.

Director’s Statement

I came onto Distance as both writer and editor, and the two roles never stayed separate for long. In script review I felt Ming’s arc needed one more quiet beat of strain before the ending could land, so I proposed an entirely new scene, him alone at his desk, failing to get through his homework, and we built it into the draft together. Later in post, I noticed our planned ending wasn’t earning the reconciliation we wanted, so I proposed two additional closing shots and worked directly with our cinematographer to capture mirrored close-ups of father and son finally looking at each other. Neither fix came from working alone in a room. Both came from catching a problem early enough to still do something about it, and trusting the people around me enough to bring it to them rather than quietly patching it myself later.