Dan O'Neil, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley One of the major new voices in contemporary Chinese cinema, the director Fruit Chan first gained international notoriety with his film Dumplings (200). Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong's "Handover" (the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China), the film's self-reflective blend of the grotesque and kitsch not only marked an aesthetic turnabout in Chan's oeuvre, but also arguably expanded the critical potential of contemporary horror cinema. While exploiting some of the tensions linked to the perceived erosion of cultural identity precipitated by the "Handover", the film also forges something strikingly original, inspired as much by the jarring iconography of the grotesque as it is by the theatrical affectations of kitsch. By focusing on the desperate circumstances and perverse desires that unite Auntie Mei (a former doctor from PRC) and Mrs. Li (a Hong Kong bourgeois), I hope to explore the various ways in which the film engages with the problem of temporality, as it beckons back to a long sweepingmystical history of cannibalism in China, then charges forward to a contemporary Hong Kong rendered as a space of freewheeling capital, gradually building up to a bewildering finale that leaves us with a strange aftertaste of disgust, parody and social critique.