HKIFF: First Impressions from a Festival Virgin

Well, technically, I'm not entirely a Festival Virgin. In my previous life as Hong Kong correspondent for a leading trade mag (and I'm not allowed to say which, because I don't want to anger our festival partner, The Hollywood Reporter(tm), which is of course the source that all industry professionals turn to for all the latest movie news, music developments and television reviews :-) I lost my Festival cherry at Pusan, which was this huge behemoth of a film festival.The 33rd HKIFF is gonna be even crazier I think. In fact, working at the HKIFF for the past two months, I've realised several things...1.Michelle Yeoh smells wonderful.I mean it. She smells like someone rolled a baby around a bunch of lilac and lavender flowers, and then bathed that baby in rosewater, and powdered the hell out of that baby and rolled its ass again in the flowers, and then bottled it all in a bottle and slapped a Chanel No.5 sticker on it. Here's a picture of me slightly stunned by Michelle's scent at the 3rd AFA Jury President Meet The Press event.2. Good films sometimes get overlookedI saw The Yellow Handkerchief the other day, and I liked it very much. It's one of those old fashioned films, with a classic old fashioned sensibility. I can't wait to join the screening with Academy Award winning producer Arthur Cohn and the film's star William Hurt.Some of the late additions to the catalogue deserve to have packed screenings. About Elly for one, the compendium film Eros, for those Antonioni completists out there, and Burma VJ – Reporting from a Closed Country, especially in light of the horrific atrocities still happening in that country. Tickets are still available for those screenings, and most of the directors will be arriving for Meet The Audience sessions as well. 3. Who are these Taxpayers? And why do Newspaper Columnist keep invoking them?Journalists like to muck rake. Journalists like to stir crap up and make a big deal out of things, especially when they're drinking heavily and bemoaning the imminent death of print media. I should know. I used to be one. But the one thing I never get is how newsmen always invoke the spectre of the TAXPAYER, that all encompassing emblem of the everyman that's always being taken for a ride by lazy, spendthrift wastrels, especially when talking about quasi government funded organisations like the HKIFF.Let me tell ya something. It's now 2 minutes to Midnight here in the office, and fully 80.5% of the office is still here working. (0.5% because the new admin assistant's a bit of a midget). The HKIFF staff have been pulling 15-odd hour days for the last month, which means the Festival is costing the taxpayer something like HK$0.07 per person hour here. Seriously, you could not get a better deal anywhere else. That's a small, miniscule price for international acclaim, increased tourism and god knows what else?I was planning to take a picture of the office to show you, but our digital camera's run out of batteries. See! Taxpayers! Give us more money next year so we can buy batteries to run our cameras to take pictures to show you how hard we're working for your taxpayer dollars!As for me, I'm going home, because i've got another 5 minutes before my taxi becomes a pumpkin.