Four Trails was an ambivalent experience.
On paper, it's an inspiring sports story about athletes pushing the limits to take on an impossible challenge.
But I got something darker out of it.
Director Robin Lee captured something else that he didn't intend to document, and it slowly became my main focus, of which I will explain...
The Hong Kong Four Trails Ultra Challenge is an extreme hiking marathon challenge in which contestants complete the four Hong Kong hiking trails, totaling 298 kilometers, within 72 hours. The documentary follows several veteran hikers who aim to finish the challenge in under 50 hours.
As I cheered on the individual athletes' Herculean efforts to complete the run under 50 hours, there was a creepiness to how much the contestants and the group were behaving.
Two athletes were risking permanent injury to their knees. One of them, who had stitched from an injury weeks prior, decided to run anyway and had a nurse on standby to examine and possibly restitch his injury between the trails.
Why didn't anyone encourage the poor chap to rest and do the run next year for the sake of his leg? It's an annual event!
No, the group cheers him on.
It's a supportive, warm community-as long as the athlete keeps pushing on!
And every year, the Four Trails creator makes the rules more challenging, shortening the cutoff time, banning painkillers and music, and changing the start time to evening. Where does this intensity come from?
As I was cringing over the contestant's leg wound, wondering if a resulting amputation would snap them all out of this spell and realize how insane they were behaving... it dawned on me. I saw what Werner Herzog deems the Ecstatic Truth.
I recognize this behavior from hobby groups where a cult-like dynamic naturally develops. The once-passionate hobby leader assumes a power position over the participants, controlling the very thing that the group enjoys, to the point of holding it ransom. The intensity then cranks up in odd ways and the participants become fiercely competitive.
I'm sure this social dynamic happens in all hobby groups around the world, but being from Hong Kong, I link the behavior in Four Trails specifically to Hong Kong and even Hong Kong expats, too.
It's how fast life in Hong Kong moves and how hard and busy people work to keep up with it. They work hard and proverbially have a need to play hard as well, which ends up being unknowingly exploited in this process.
I've chatted with friends and colleagues since I saw Four Trails. One friend joined and quit the local dodgeball league after one trial cause of how aggressively competitive people were and how hard they were chucking the balls. Another friend told me he quit a football group because the organizer instructed the players to only pass the ball to him to score.
As an inspiring documentary of the athletic spirit, I give Four Trails a 7. As an accidental portrait of Hong Kong life and the intensity therein, I rate it an 8.
