Another Day of Depression in Kowloon

The film belongs to the genre of "machinima" (English "machine" and "cinema"). Machinimas are filmed exclusively within video games or with video game software.

»Another Day of Depression in Kowloon« originated in the popular first-person shooter video game »Call of Duty: Black Ops« (Treyarch, 2010), set in the 1960s. One of the game's locations is a now-defunct district of Hong Kong: Kowloon Walled City. The district was a Chinese enclave in British Hong Kong. With neither the Chinese nor the British government providing law enforcement, Kowloon Walled City became a place of organized crime in the 1950s.

The artist removed the graphic game elements, such as the map view and avoided meeting other game characters while recording the film. What remains is a rainy and deserted cityscape. For over a year, Ip Yuk-Yiu played and documented the Hong Kong district clichéd in the video game, which disappeared in 1993 when it was demolished. »Another Day of Depression in Kowloon« thus uses the example of Hong Kong's digital representation to examine how the Western-influenced gaze of the mass media affects cultural representations in and the design of games.