Reel Asian 2024 Quick Hits: Borrowed Time and Lucky Star

The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival runs from November 13 to 24, 2025. Anton and Aren Bergstrom offer some quick takes on two features presented during the festival: Choy Ji’s Borrowed Time, a Chinese film about a young woman searching for her estranged father in Hong Kong, and Lucky Star, Gillian McKercher’s Canadian indie about a reformed gambler whose is drawn back into his old ways after a run of bad luck.

Choy Ji’s Borrowed Time has many of the hallmarks of good international arthouse cinema: soft photography, an affecting score, and a keen eye for time and place: Guangzhou and Hong Kong during the late pandemic. The movie follows Yuen-Ting (Lin Dongping), who feels distraught on the eve of her wedding and heads to Hong Kong in search of her estranged father.

From the opening scene, where Yuen-Ting joins her fiance’s family at a lychee orchard and wanders away from their conversations of money and family, we can sense she feels adrift. When she heads to Hong Kong, this feeling comes to the fore. The movie views Hong Kong from the perspective of the mainlander, more interested in the city’s liminal green spaces and afterhours fruit markets than in the sort of dense urban mayhem typical of Hong Kong films.

Unfortunately, while the movie has the good sense to attempt to imitate the best aspects of slow international cinema, the movie’s dramatic arc lacks stakes. The two key emotional encounters for Yuen-Ting happen late in the feature, with early scenes mostly related to her standing around empty rooms, silently reflecting. There’s nothing wrong with lack of movement within the physical frame, but Borrowed Time lacks momentum of any kind.

Yuen-Ting is obsessed with a bootleg disk and old notes from the father who abandoned her and her mom to flee back to his other family in Hong Kong. Both the disk and the notes reflect on the concept of “borrowed time,” the feeling that the life you’re experiencing is not your own, but something you have to pay back. Choy’s movie lives in that space at the exclusion of everything else. There’s thematic tension here, but no dramatic or aesthetic tension. The result is a film that’s tasteful, but a bit adrift like its central character.

- Aren Bergstrom

Borrowed Time (2023, China)

Directed by Choy Ji; written by Wang Yin; starring Lin Dongping, Eddy Au-Yeung, Pan Jie, Tai Bo, Sunny Sun.

Gillian McKercher’s Lucky Star is a window onto a man and his family’s troubles, set amidst the Chinese-Canadian community, and the cold December snows, of Calgary’s suburban sprawl. Lucky (Terry Chen) is a reformed gambler who has a small tech repair shop. He is always one payment behind, and he’s always hitting up everyone for small loans, including his university student daughter, Grace (Conni Miu). At the same time, he hides things from his wife, Noel (Olivia Cheng), and their youngest daughter, Jenny (Summer Ly). When Lucky gets scammed, everything in his already unstable life goes from bad to worse. McKercher’s choice to allow character flaws, bad choices, and luck to all shape the narrative is one reason the film seems true to life.

Lucky Star hinges on Terry Chen’s capable central performance. Chen plays Lucky as an affable father with a desperate edge: he has tattoos and a cool haircut and is present with his kids, but at times he snaps in rage at his wife. Chen conveys Lucky’s attempts to conceal how stretched he feels. Olivia Cheng conveys some dimensions to the wife, but she is given too many lingering reaction shots. The film brings up several rich subplots for the daughter that remain underdeveloped.

This is a fine film but a limited one. Certain directorial choices keep what could be a truly gripping, even intense, narrative in the realm of slow-paced indie drama. McKercher regularly pares back storylines and deflates tension. There are too many slow zooms in on characters, and too many scenes are broken up by quiet shots of characters in parked cars or driving. Things culminate in a fairly subdued, expected way.

With a running time below 90 minutes, the pacing doesn’t prove fatal, however, and the film retains its slice-of-life quality.

- Anton Bergstrom

Lucky Star (2024, Canada)

Written and directed by Gillian McKercher; starring Terry Chen, Olivia Cheng, Conni Miu, Summer Ly, Andrew Phung, John Dylan Louie.