What Hong Kong cinema can take away from a popular Chinese war film

In late August, I took my parents to see Once Upon a Time in the Middle East in their small-town cinema on the mainland.

Built around an unnamed conflict widely understood to be the US-led Iraq war, the film has become the kind of phenomenon no marketing budget could buy, projected to reach 2. 5 billion yuan (US$372. 5 million) largely through word of mouth. Its Hong Kong and overseas release will revive geopolitical…