GOOD NATURED FARE AMIDST HIDDEN TURMOIL

THE 24TH HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL
FILM FESTIVAL: A REPORT

Stephen Teo

 
Long admired as a festival without frills, dedicated to film buffery and film scholarship, the 24th edition of the Hong Kong International Film Festival held from April 12-27, 2000, might well be the last of its type. The financial crisis besetting Hong Kong since the October stock market crash of 1997 finally caught up with the film festival as the Hong Kong Government, which has run the festival from its inception, imposed cost-cutting measures - slashing the salaries of contract staff by 30%; reshuffled management teams; and replaced the whole department responsible for the day-to-day running of the festival. The changes, which took effect at the beginning of the year, inevitably generated friction between the programmers and the new administration recruited from the government bureaucracy, and the latest word is that the programmers have all resigned - soon after the festival closed.

More startlingly, the rumour is that the ex-programmers are contemplating starting a new festival independent of the HKIFF. All these couldn't have come at a worst time for the festival organizers. A report in the Asian Wall Street Journal dated 20 April, just when the festival was in the midst of its run, had made some unflattering comparisons between HKIFF and its other Asian competitors and concluded that Hong Kong had slipped down the prestige ladder, with the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea now occupying the top post. Whether fair or not, such media speculation and comparison with Pusan, together with the internal tribulations now affecting the programming department, should worry the top brass - a faceless and nameless group of civil servants - who hold the future of the HKIFF in their hands.

The turmoil within the HKIFF was well hidden during the run of the festival. Programmers good-naturedly carried on with business as usual, and the fare of the 24th edition was strong and varied, with more events happening around the festival's periphery than ever before. There was the inauguration of the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) designed to bring Asian filmmakers and financiers together to discuss individual projects; and the Second International Conference on Chinese Cinema ruminating on the theme 'History, Technology and the Future of Transnational Chinese Film and Television', held at the Baptist University of Hong Kong. In attendance were heavyweight scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, David Denby, Chris Berry, Esther Yau, Sheldon Lu. Finally, the 19th edition of the Hong Kong Film Awards was held on 16th April at the Hong Kong Coliseum, an impressive affair that received a thumbs-up report from American critic Richard Corliss writing for Time Magazine, who compared it favourably over the Oscars.

The festival proper opened with Lawrence Ah Mon's Spacked Out and Wim Wenders' The Million Dollar Hotel, two films that set the fringe-existentialist tone of many of the Asian, European and American-independent films on view (witness the titles of the 'gala presentations': Being John Malkovich, eXistenZ, Felicia's Journey). Titles from the Asian section impressed wildly: China's Suzhou River, Thailand's 6ixtynin9, Singapore's Eating Air, South Korea's Attack the Gas Station. The roughness of these contemporary-youth movies of 1999 were touched with an aggrieved sensibility and raw anguish. Watch out in the new millennium for the names of Lou Ye, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng, and Kim Sang-jin -- the directors of the Asian films mentioned. Whether the 'Asian fever' brewing in the festival air foreshadows the rise of a 'Pan-Asian cinema' remains to be seen. It was all the talk in the Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony and the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum. A section devoted to Asian independent films and videos going under the rubric 'The Age of Independents' fed the frenzy, but the programme was a very mixed bag ranging from accomplished thriller aesthetics (Lou Ye's Suzhou River being included in this section) to ponderous neo-fetishistic eccentricism (Huang Mingchuan's Flat Tyre, Li Ying's 2 H - the latter sharing the Fipresci prize with Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 6ixtynin9).

The sidebars devoted entirely to Hong Kong cinema - the Panorama and the Retrospective - continued to define the strengths of the Hong Kong film festival. The Panorama is a selection of contemporary Hong Kong films released over the past year, while the Retrospective is a major sidebar featuring more than 30 Hong Kong films from bygone years. The Panorama this year had a sidebar-within-a-sidebar spotlighting three of the best actors working in Hong Kong cinema right now: Anthony Wong, Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng (one may recall them in films such as Herman Yau's The Untold Story, Andrew Lau's Young and Dangerous, Benny Chan's Big Bullet, Ringo Lam's Full Alert, released between 1993-1997; and Wilson Yip's Bullets Over Summer, Ringo Lam's Victim, Johnnie To's Running Out of Time and The Mission - all 1999 releases featured in the Panorama-cum-spotlight).

The theme of the Retrospective was 'Border Crossings in Hong Kong Cinema' covering films of the 1940s to the early 90s that were co-productions between Hong Kong and other film industries in the region (the Asian countries and Australia) and around the world (Spain, France, the US). The theme complemented the larger theme of the Pan-Asian Cinema that underlined the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, for example, and focused the mind on the potential for Hong Kong to cooperate with film industries around the region (particularly the more established industries of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, and Thailand). Despite such expectations, however, there was a touch of the swansong to the 24th edition of the HKIFF.

The future of the film festival is uncertain. It now looks likely that the next edition in 2001 will be a much scaled-down affair. For starters, the Hong Kong Retrospective sidebar will be assigned to the Hong Kong Film Archive (scheduled to open in November 2000) to showcase. And if an alternative independent-led festival gets up and running (most likely in 2002), the HKIFF may find its constituency pared down further, and, unable to justify its scale, become no more than a rump festival in future. There is a strong case for 'privatizing' the festival so that professionals, rather than bureaucrats, can handle the jobs of programming and administration, but having come this far, the government doesn't seem ready to give up its most prestigious cultural event. An independent HKIFF now seems a pipe-dream but whatever way the festival turns, the 24th edition will inevitably be judged a watershed moment in the post-1997 history of the festival: a harbinger of the end of certainty, or perhaps a harbinger of the beginning of the end.

Stephen Teo, film critic and author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997), has worked for the Hong Kong International Film Festival as English Editor of the Hong Kong Retrospective programme. He currently resides in Melbourne, Australia, where he is working on a dissertation on the martial arts cinema that he hopes to publish as a book.