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Hong Kong has been the main source of Vancouver's urban energy and city-building ideas for two decades, but we know so little about it. One would think a city sharing so much with Vancouver in trade, families, architecture, and cuisine would be second nature to us. Not so -those few non-Chinese-speaking Vancouverites who visit there usually confine their stays to brief stopovers focused on tiny zones of Central on Victoria Island, and Tsim Tsa Tsui in Kowloon. Most of us have had as little experience of Hong Kong's New Territories as we have of Canada's Northwest Territories.

The New Territories figure large in an esoteric but effective "experimental documentary" that plays at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival, which starts today. Hong Kong's New Territories are Burnaby, Surrey and Richmond all rolled into one, but at extreme housing densities and with a frenzy of street-side shops. To understand these more workaday areas of Hong Kong is to understand the forces behind the increasing vitality of Richmond's Number 3 Road, or for that matter, Vancouver's Broadway.

The textures of Hong Kong's public spaces, the pop and ping of streets, the constant movement of a city that never stops working (or eating), are brought together in the bizarrely-named One Way Street on a Turntable. Don't let that strange title, its aggressive soundtrack of found urban noise, or its plot-less wander through markets and mall lobbies stop you from seeing what is, for me, the first film that has captured Hong Kong as it is actually lived.

The New Territories was the urban expansion zone as millions from then-Red China crowded into the former Crown Colony in the 1950s and 60s. Huge housing estates at Shatin, Kwun Tong, Mei Foo Sun Cheun and elsewhere were constructed from then right through the 70s, vertical cities rising in tower after identical tower to stack up the new arrivals, resulting in a density of occupation that no place on Earth had seen before. Mei Foo Sun Cheun was childhood home to the film's writer-director, Anson Mak, whose voice-over in the film recalls the 99 almost identical towers there.

This is a place that all Vancouverites need to know - both to understand the previous lives of so many who live amongst us, and to know what extreme residential densities are like as inhabited, not just talked about as Vancouverites have in the eager initial innocence of "EcoDensity."

The film has Ms. Mak as a solitary urban walker returning to the neighbourhoods of her childhood, and to places like the King Wah restaurant, where her parents celebrated their wedding in 1968.

Noodle shops, garment rows, escalators, bus zones, school yards, Star Ferry: Hong Kong is walked and remembered by Ms. Mak with a tone of curiosity, but not nostalgia. This film is an amble without direction, but also without moral judgment.

The double even quadruple-layered digital image manipulations of One Way Street on a Turntable are a cinematic means of evoking the multi-tracking that is life on the over-burdened streets of Hong Kong.

The One Way Street of the film's title refers to an essay of the same name written between the wars by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and sentences from it are quoted throughout the film. His writings and tragic life (he committed suicide while trying to escape the Holocaust) have been rediscovered over the past two decades, and at least part of Ms. Mak's tone of acceptance without capitulation derives from Benjamin's example.

Hong Kong's streets are aggressive places, grinding away the patience and humanity of residents and visitors, and, fittingly, this is an aggressive film, with jarring noises and low resolution, largely in black and white. Some of the edginess that Vancouver now possesses as a city comes from the pulse of people and investment from Hong Kong. Sit through One Way Street on a Turntable and see a bit of what we are and what we are becoming.

tboddy@globeandmail.com