Hong Kong-born filmmaker Robin Lee never expected that Four Trails, his first feature-length production, would become a box-office success.
Four Trails – a documentary about runners who competed in the Hong Kong Four Trails Ultra Challenge, the city’s gruelling ultramarathon race – was originally supposed to have only a limited release. It was expected to only make between HK$100,000 to HK$300,000 at the box office.
“Because it’s a documentary of a fairly niche sport, everyone was just thinking, It’s just going to be a small screening,” Lee told HKFP at his Stanley walk-up flat, sitting at a dining table, also used as an editing station.
However, after the documentary was released last December, tickets for the first five screenings sold out. Film distributor Edko doubled the number of screenings, and tickets were also gone. Again and again.
“Because everything just sold out for an entire month, Edko [was] like, ‘OK, I think, enough people know about this film now,’” the film director recalled.
The movie later enjoyed a wide theatrical release in January. It was shown in Broadway cinemas citywide, with 75 screenings a day. As of early March, it had raked in more than HK$9 million in box office sales.
There was an early sign of Four Trails’ success. It won the Audience Choice Award at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival in 2023.
But Lee said its success at the box office still took everyone by surprise. “If you go by the numbers, by the books, Edko wouldn’t underestimate anything, because a traditional documentary doesn’t do more than what it does,” he said.
More than just runners
Four Trails was shot during the 2021 edition of the annual ultramarathon. The trail running challenge was founded by Hong Kong-based German expat Andre Blumberg in 2012, and covers Hong Kong’s four major hiking routes – MacLehose, Wilson, Hong Kong, and Lantau – spanning a total distance of 298km.
Among the runners featured in the documentary are: Stone Tsang and Salomon Wettstein, the golden boys of the Four Trails ultramarathon gunning for below 50-hour finishing time; Sarah Pemberton, the youngest of the participants and the only one to be taking on the challenge for the fourth time; dark horse Jacky Leung; and Law Kai-pong, who suffered a major injury just weeks before the race.
In the film, they become more than just runners, each telling their own story of approach and ambition in participating in the ultramarathon.
Wettstein, a tech consultant, times his race down to the second with surgical precision, while Pemberton challenges herself to claim the coveted title of “finisher” by completing the race under the 60-hour mark. Leung and Law, meanwhile, participate for the last time before leaving Hong Kong with their families.
Lee had more than 10 years of filmmaking experience under his belt when he made Four Trails.
However, faced with 200 hours of raw footage at one point, as well as the self-doubt and unfamiliar terrain that came with working on one’s debut feature, he eventually came to see the film as something of a commentary on his own marathon filmmaking process.
He recalled the emotional roller coaster after editing the scenes of Wettstein deciding to drop out of the race. “I remember the first time I edited that, I was like, OK, I really like this. But after the 50th time of watching it, I [did not] get goosebumps anymore. I’d think, ‘Is it not good?'” he said.
“That happens for every single segment… and you’ve just got to remind yourself of your initial feeling – that’s what hopefully the audience is going to feel when they watch it.”
Making the film “was my personal Four Trails,” said Lee, who spent most of his childhood and early adolescence in Hong Kong. “You have the same lows that the runners do, but then maybe you edit one segment together, and then all of a sudden, it’s amazing.”
The self-funded passion project was the culmination of a decade of working as a freelance videographer abroad. An avid skier in his youth – “fairly decent but nowhere near [professional],” he quipped – Lee began filming himself on the slopes after realising going pro wasn’t an option. He first tried with a GoPro camera before eventually upgrading to a Canon 7D, a gift from his father.
Following brief stints at CNN and Ogilvy fresh out of university, Lee worked for a Colorado-based production company focusing on ski films, shooting in Japan, Iceland, Russia, India, and across the US and Europe. Five years into the job, he got bored, and while resting back home in Hong Kong, he realised: “I wanted to take the stuff that I did overseas and bring it back to Hong Kong.”
In 2017, Lee directed another documentary, Breaking 60, named after the much-coveted 60-hour time limit to finish the ultramarathon. The earlier film was shorter and rougher around the edges. Though Lee didn’t know it at the time, the 45-minute vignette would pave the way for his debut feature.
“It goes back to Breaking 60 and supporting friends who have done the four trails,” he said. That was how he learned to deploy his dozen-strong team at key checkpoints, based on the runners’ GPS-tracked locations, some stationary, some mobile.
He learned that Shek O was a key turning point, infamous for being where runners start dropping out of the race, and the Twins, along the Wilson trail, was considered one of the hardest hikes in the city.
“Climbing up to the Buddha, that section is just horrible, so let’s make sure we get a camera here,” he recalled.
Before the actual February 2021 race, Lee filmed the participants on their training runs, including Tsang who did the MacLehose and Wilson trails in a single session.
More than capturing some footage, it also allowed him to get to know each of the runners and to scout for key filming spots along the trails.
“You’re kind of building this database of areas that you would like to film for purely aesthetic reasons, then other locations where you know that you can interact with [the runners] so they can talk to you, give their feelings, so you can build out their stories.”
Surprises, departures
But despite the meticulous planning that went into capturing every turn of each runner’s race, Four Trails was nothing short of a surprise. All eyes were on Tsang and Wettstein, the duo with an ambition to “break 50,” but no one expected Leung to finish the four trails in 49 hours and 21 minutes.
“It was just like the film, just a complete shock that something like this is happening,” Lee said.
Leung, then 37 years old, doesn’t even make his first appearance until the final third of the film, though not quite as a result of a conscious creative decision by the team. Because of the staggered start times, which had Leung kick off second to last, no one realised that he was actually close to leading the pack.
And because he had joined late, filling a slot after internationals pulled out in the lead-up to the event, there was no interview footage of him on his training runs.
At one point in the film, it is almost as if you realise before he does: Leung is on his way to break 50. Then the tape rewinds, bringing the audience back to the starting line, showing Leung, seemingly unremarkable, at the beginning of his 49-hour swan song.
“No one knew about Jacky [Leung] until the Lantau Trail. The film portrays it exactly how we were feeling,” Lee said. “So I came up with the rewind, don’t really show Jacky in the first half because no one was really paying attention to him, and edit the film how it played out.”
In a way, the process of filming Four Trails mirrored the unpredictability of the ultramarathon. No amount of planning could prepare the runners for what would come on the trail, or the film crew for Leung’s finish. Call it a lapse in judgement, a logistical constraint, or a lack of preparation, but Lee was just happy it turned out well.
“I’m incredibly grateful that that happened,” he said.
“In the trail running community, we always knew that it would be popular, but I always wanted to make it a film [that] people outside the community could enjoy. So that was a big goal when I was editing it and putting it together and filming it.”
Throughout his interview, Leung makes offhanded mentions of the 2021 race being his “last,” without mentioning explicitly his plan to leave the city in a matter of months. Fast forward to the release of Four Trails in December, he was in his third year in Edinburgh.
Lee, meanwhile, is in conversations with a distributor to bring the documentary overseas. It would be small, intimate screenings, with the simple aim of bringing the film to Hong Kong communities overseas.
“But we really want to get it out there,” the director said. “People… have watched it in Hong Kong and asked us when’s the film going to go on platforms, not for them to watch it again but because they want to show people overseas that this is what Hong Kong has.”
Leung would also mention how uplifting and motivational Four Trails turned out. It was a fitting counterpoint to the emotional catharsis of a recent wave of Hong Kong cinema.
As the Hong Kong Film Critics Society put it, “local structures of feeling,” the natural scenery, and each runner’s personal narrative all made Four Trails a “timely boost of morale to a low-spirited Hong Kong.”
The film even inspired a group of primary school students to hike the final stretch of the Lantau trail and make a pilgrimage to the green mailbox in Mui Wo, the finish line of the ultramarathon race.
While hoping he would also get something out of that boost, the director said he was in no rush to take on another film project.
“Four Trails took three years and it’s probably going to be even more out of my life, which I’m grateful for and I’m happy to do it, but it’s such a big commitment that I don’t want to jump into another project without having that same motivation,” Lee said.
Making the documentary “was my own four trails,” he said again, adding, “and maybe there’s a lot of Hongkongers who’ve got their own four trails, whatever it may be.”
