Ciao UFO () is a 2019 Hong Kong drama film directed by Patrick Leung and starring Chui Tien-you, Charlene Choi, and Wong You-nam as a group of childhood best friends growing up together. Based on the 1985 urban legend surrounding UFO sightings at Wah Fu Estate, the story follows their lives from 1985 to 2003, tracing how they witness a UFO together as children but gradually drift apart as they grow older and pursue their own ambitions, ultimately forgetting their childhood dreams.
The film was conceptualised in 2016 as a crossover project between the boy group Shine, consisting of Chui and Wong, and the girl group Twins, consisting of Choi and Gillian Chung, to coincide with Shine's comeback concert tour. The screenplay was completed in 2017, with Patrick Leung attached as director, while Chung dropped out due to scheduling conflict. Principal photography took place from May to August 2018, with most location shooting conducted at Wah Fu Estate. The film also features the theme song "Wah Fu One", performed by .
The film had its world premiere as the opening film of the on 29 October 2019. However, due to disputes with its distributor, the film was unable to secure a theatrical release until the distribution contract expired in 2025. It began limited preview screenings on 19 December 2025, before receiving a theatrical release in Hong Kong on 19 March 2026. The film received 10 nominations in the 44th Hong Kong Film Awards and won in five categories, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Michelle Wai.
Plot In 1985, Kin lives in Wah Fu Estate and is best friends with his neighbours Heem and Hoyi. Heem suffers from leukemia and fears his constant medication, while Hoyi faces pressure from her parents to excel academically and become a professional. Kin's father, a sailor, teaches him stargazing and tells him stories about UFOs. Inspired, the three children dream of building a "Wah Fu One" spaceship and leaving Earth to find aliens one day. One day, Kin's father falls seriously ill during a voyage and is hospitalized in a coma. Kin, Heem, Hoyi, and Hoyi's younger brother Ho-fung go to the rooftop of Wah Fu and witness a UFO hidden among the clouds. Kin wishes for the aliens to save his father, and when he returns to the hospital, his father wakes up. However, he fails to recognize Kin and instead asks about his two daughters, revealing that he had another family in secret, before he dies. Devastated, Kin tells his friends he wishes he had never seen the UFO and learned the truth. The group drifts apart and loses contact.
In 1997, Kin has become an orphan after losing his mother soon after his father's death. Forced to leave school to support himself, he reconnects with a former classmate Yan, after she hires him to repair her computer. They grow close, and one night Yan persuades him to sneak back into their secondary school. There, she reveals that she has secretly kept the homemade stargazing device he made years earlier, which she still treasures. Kin tells her to keep it. Hoyi graduates with an accounting degree and hopes to work at the Space Museum, but is rejected since she is not from an astronomy background. She instead joins an accounting firm, though she finds the work joyless. Heem, who still believes in UFOs, appears on a television program after angrily criticizing its portrayal of alien dissections. During the interview, a scientist dismisses his claims, prompting Heem to publicly reveal that Kin and Hoyi also witnessed the UFO. However, both are too occupied with work to see the broadcast.
Kin discovers that Yan is the mistress of a billionaire after encountering some women confronting her at her apartment. Kin accepts her past and promises to support her financially. Hoping to improve his fortunes, he begins speculating in stocks based on advice from the owner of the newspaper stall where he works. However, he loses everything during the 1997 financial crisis and falls into despair. Yan later tells him she is pregnant with the billionaire's child and moving to Vancouver, but Kin does not ask her to stay. Hoyi begins dating Austin, a senior accountant at her firm. After she passes her professional exams, Austin informs her parents of their marriage plans without consulting her, believing life should follow a strict timetable. Seeing her parents delighted, Hoyi remains silent.
Before the wedding, Ho-fung helps Hoyi to locate Kin and Heem so she can invite them. He finds Heem at his family's stationery shop, where Heem reveals his leukemia has returned. Ho-fung fails to find Kin directly and instead emails every "Chan Tsz-kin" in Hong Kong. On the wedding day, Heem reunites with Hoyi and brings an old videotape of their childhood promise to travel into space together, but Austin throws it away as childish nonsense, and it forces Hoyi to reconsider the life she has chosen. During the wedding, Kin finally arrives. Together, the three friends return to the night they saw the UFO and reflect on whether they fulfilled their childhood dreams. Hoyi ultimately abandons the wedding and leaves with Kin and Heem. As the guests sit in confusion, Ho-fung takes the microphone and recounts the night the four of them saw the UFO, declaring that he still believes in aliens. Soon after the friends reunite and watch the videotape together, Heem dies from cancer, and the city begins facing the SARS outbreak.
Cast Chui Tien-you as Kin, the son of a sailor who pursues wealth through the stock market amid Hong Kong's economic bubble of the 1990s Matthew Wong as the younger version of Kin Charlene Choi as Hoyi, an academically accomplished girl who becomes an accountant through hard work Lam Seung-yu as the younger version of Hoyi Wong You-nam as Heem, who has suffered from leukaemia since childhood and "lives constantly in the short term under the shadow of illness" Chui Ka-him as the younger version of Heem Michelle Wai as Yan, Kin's high-school crush and the mistress of a billionaire Ng Siu-hin as Hofung, Hoyi's younger brother Shawn Heung as the younger version of Hofung Rachel Leung as Cat, Heem's ambitious girlfriend as Austin, an accountant and Hoyi's "dullard" fiancé Michael Ning as Uncle, a "spaced-out" artist and the uncle of Hoyi and Hofung who "spouts Maoist anti-capitalist doctrine" Chu Pak-hong as Heem's brother, a pragmatic real estate agent
Also appearing in the film are Alex To as Kin's father, a sailor who secretly keeps another family outside his marriage; JJ Jia as Kin's mother; Lo Hoi-pang and Stephen Au as Heem's grandfather and father respectively; Anthony Chan as Kin's boss, a newspaper stall owner who speculates in taxi licenses; as Hoyi's boss; Alfred Cheung as the curator of the Hong Kong Space Museum; Yeung Wai-lun as a job applicant at the Space Museum; and Jiro Lee and Chip Tsao as the host and guest scientist respectively of a conspiracy theory-themed television program.
Production Development
Film producer 's company managed the boy group Shine (consisting of Chui Tien-you and Wong You-nam) and would plan a film project to sustain the duo's renewed popularity following their comeback concerts, beginning with their 2013 concert tour and the film The Midnight After (2014), in which they both starred. In 2016, the company planned to develop another film coinciding with their 2018 concert tour. Aiming to center the film on youths in the 1980s, Chin initially envisioned it as a crossover project between Shine and the girl group Twins (consisting of Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung). , the screenwriter of The Midnight After, brought up the urban legends surrounding UFO sightings at Wah Fu Estate during a conversation with Chin, who thought the topic could serve as the film's central theme after conducting online research. Chin also cited a conversation with screenwriter and member about humanity's tendency to pursue "lofty" dreams such as finding extraterrestrial life, which became the "emotional core" of the film. To research the urban legend, Kong reviewed reports of UFO sightings documented by Tuesday Report and Hong Kong Connection, while also conducting various interviews to construct the film's characters.
In 2017, after completing the screenplay, Chin sought an experienced director for the project and approached Patrick Leung, a university classmate with whom she had previously worked when Leung served as assistant director to John Woo and Chin worked in production for Woo's company Milestone Pictures. Leung initially hesitated after reading the first draft because he felt the film "lacked obvious commercial or genre-driven elements", but Chin described it as "a film for Hong Kong people" that "would never be made in the future if it was not made now", which convinced him to join the project. Leung explained that the story was largely inspired by the large-scale UFO sighting incident at Wah Fu Estate in 1985, which had even been documented by the media at the time and adapted into a documentary by RTHK, and said that he based the film on accounts provided by multiple witnesses.
Gillian Chung later withdrew from the project due to scheduling conflicts, and her role was filled by Michelle Wai, who belonged to the same talent agency. To prepare for her role as a fan of Yi Shu's novels, Wai specifically read the author's works and attempted to embody the feminine traits portrayed in them. The younger versions of the protagonists were selected from a pool of more than 100 child actors by Chin, Leung, and the assistant director, who aimed to ensure that the children's appearances and temperaments reflected those of their adult counterparts. The assistant director, who was also a parent, took care of the children during filming. Leung adopted a hands-off approach for the youngest actor, who was only around four to five years old, allowing him to behave freely on set in order to capture his "most natural and endearing" expressions. The film's ending underwent constant revisions, with changes continuing until shortly before filming began, as Leung wanted the film's ending to "round up things" while Chin hoped to avoid making it feel overly preachy. According to Amy Chin, the film's original ending revealed the aftermath of Kin (played by Chui Tien-you) and Hoyi (played by Charlene Choi), where Kin travels to Malaysia to search for his paternal half-sisters, while Hoyi goes to Australia and meets a new boyfriend, who was slated to be played by singer Khalil Fong. Leung said that he had invited Fong to take on the role, but due to budget constraints preventing filming in Australia, the scene and Fong's appearance were ultimately scrapped.
Filming
Principal photography began on 29 May 2018 at the Hong Kong Space Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui, with Alfred Cheung, Rachel Leung, and Ng Siu-hin also announced as part of the cast. Leung Ming-kai served as the film's cinematographer. Produced on a budget of HK$15 million,Multiple sources: which Chin described as "difficult for a project of such scale", the production relied heavily on location shooting, cast mostly young new actors, and recreated many scenes set in the 1980s and 1990s through computer animation supervised by visual effects artist Water Chan. Most of the film was set and shot on location at Wah Fu Estate, which is scheduled for redevelopment beginning in 2027. As residents of Wah Fu Estate must pass through the Aberdeen Tunnel to reach the city, Kong found it "interesting" that "they have to travel from a quiet neighborhood into the dazzling prosperity of Hong Kong", and incorporated the Tunnel into the film. The production's single largest expense was renting a to film a sequence set inside the Aberdeen Tunnel. Several rooftop scenes at Wah Fu Estate and scenes inside Heem's (played by Wong You-nam) flat, were recreated as studio sets.