| Overview: | City Without Baseball is a youth drama with gay undertones that explores the lives of the Hong Kong Baseball Team members in a city where baseball culture is non-existent. The actual players, coach and manager of the Hong Kong Baseball Team all play themselves in the film and the story is based on true events in their lives. Baseball is huge in Japan and Taiwan due to American influence in their history. Hong Kong plays soccer due to its ties to Britain while baseball is both an extremely minor and non-elitist sport. For the few who choose to play baseball in Hong Kong, they find themselves with little facility backup and zero spectatorship.
Being a minority by choice, in a modern city that could have offered them much more, this group of young baseball players surprisingly holds no anger towards society. Instead, the experience taught them to be free-thinkers in dealing with their sexuality and in contemplating on the meaning of life and death. Possibly for the same reason, they all prove themselves to be natural actors, baring their souls in front of the camera most naturally and realistically. Locker-room camaraderie can also be staged effortlessly and beautifully because the actors are simply re-enacting their own little world where everyone knows everyone.
Through their calm acceptance of being a spectatorless minority and the constant use of Cantopop by recently deceased singers including Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, one can sense that the film, set in 2004, is also about a sense of loss and isolation felt by a city on its downturn.
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