This edition of Streamlined is coming to you from the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) in Udine, Italy, where I was covering both the festival and Focus Asia projects market, with the latter focusing on distribution and funding between Asia and Europe.
FEFF Welcomes Tsui Hark, Sylvia Chang, Tony Leung Ka-Fai & Assorted Monsters
Two legends of Hong Kong cinema received the Golden Mulberry Award for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s FEFF – director-producer Tsui Hark and actress-director-producer and all-round queen of Asian cinema Sylvia Chang.
The festival screened Tsui’s latest work, Legends Of The Condor Heroes: The Gallants, based on Jin Yong’s wuxia novels and released over Lunar New Year; along with the restored version of his 1984 classic Shanghai Blues and 1993 fantasy drama Green Snake. The Golden Mulberry award was presented by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai, who starred in Legends Of The Condor Heroes and, of course, more than a hundred other Hong Kong movies including Juno Mak’s upcoming Sons Of The Neon Night, which is premiering in Cannes.
Chang, who was born in Taiwan but has contributed to Hong Kong cinema for more than four decades, starred in Shanghai Blues and was also in town for the screening of Daughter’s Daughter, directed by Taiwan’s Huang Xi, which she starred in and executive produced. She also writes and produces, with a focus on encouraging new talent, and has directing credits including Love Education, Murmur Of The Hearts and 20:30:40. While in Udine, I also spotted her name on a poster for a French film, Gilles de Maistre’s Moon Le Panda, currently on release in Italy. I have to admit to being a little bit starstruck when I ran into her at FEFF’s Taiwan party.
Other stars at the festival included Japan’s Lily Franky, another gracious and elegant guest, who is known internationally for his roles in Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son and Shoplifters, and was in town for Janus Victoria’s Philippines-Malaysia-Japan co-production Diamonds In The Sand. He did however have an unexpected rival for audience attention out of Japan – the doll featured in Yaguchi Shinobu’s horror film Dollhouse, who accompanied the film’s director and producer to all the FEFF events and soon became the star that everyone wanted a selfie with.
Also on a horror note, FEFF featured a sidebar of 12 Asian supernatural, horror and fantasy films that went big on Japanese monsters or ‘yokai’, although it also featured the Chinese folklore of Tsui’s Green Snake, Thailand’s krasue floating heads and Southeast Asia’s pontianak spirits. An accompanying exhibition, Mondo Mizuki, Mondo Yokai, featured 100 pieces of artwork, magazines, books and video documents exploring the universe of manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, best known for his yokai stories.
Innovative Strategies For Arthouse Distribution
But it’s not all red carpets and grappa at FEFF. Over at Focus Asia, more than 200 industry participants from 40 territories were gathering for three furious days of project market meetings, workshops, labs and panel discussions. Some of the panels focused on Asia’s public funds, which I’ll dive into in an upcoming Streamlined Guide, while others looked at the distribution of European films in Asia and Asian films in Europe.
On the latter subject, which mostly focused on arthouse titles, we heard some inspiring case studies about how films such as Jia Zhangke’s Caught By The Tides and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light were marketed in Italy, Lithuania and Taiwan. Likewise we heard how European films such as Oscar-winning animation Flow, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves and Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow were released in territories including Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. I’m writing an analysis about selling indie films to Asia for Deadline, which will be published during Cannes, but will share a few thoughts based on the Focus Asia panels here.
Of course, it’s always been difficult to release arthouse films, but it seems to have become much harder since the pandemic. Europe has a hardcore cinephile audience, but only certain kinds of arthouse films are working and the distributors of Caught By The Tides and All We Imagine As Light had to work especially hard to promote these movies. Partly, that’s down to changing audience habits, with cinemas losing out to streaming platforms, but there were other factors – Jia’s last film required some knowledge of his previous work to be appreciated fully, and European audiences don’t have many reference points for Indian arthouse films.
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