GUNG HEI FAAT CHOI!

GUNG HEI FAAT CHOI!

I always like Chinese New Year. For some reason, my wife and I use it as an excuse for doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. We get up late. We eat. We watch television. Some times we decorate. Some times we go to the cinema and watch a stupid Cantonese comedy.

This year we went to see Alls Well That Ends Too. For those immured to the pleasures of Canto-Comedies, and there are many of you out there, I fear that you are missing the point. They are not supposed to be good. They are supposed to be stupid. They are the filmic equivalent of a British pantomime. The plots are stolen from Shakespeare, stuffed with a bit of Chinese opera, and stewed with plenty of anachronistic references to Chinese TV shows, celebrity scandals and political confusions. It is the Cantonese making fun of themselves and thumbing a nose at the pompous, petty and pretentious. The more absurd the better!

This year’s offering was not quite as wild and wonderful as previous years nonsense, though not without its fun. But one did wonder why the sound, despite the fact that nowadays camcorders having the recording power of the old Abbey Road Studios, was so dodgy in places and the cutting, despite the average office desk having the sort of postproduction facilities that Twentieth Century Fox up till the twenty-first century would have been jealous of, is decidedly cavalier. One felt that a reel was missing, or the dog had chewed it up and the cinema manager’s pot smoking eight year old son had been handed some scissors and sticky tape to fix it up a bit.   

Even so, the young guy sat beside me with a hairy mole on his chin, was hooting with laughter and he had his arm around his giggling buck toothed squint eyed girl friend. They hadn’t had much to laugh about this year, and this was as good as it got.

SCREENWRITING NEWS

Frankly I haven’t got any news other than the Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards are screening at the Hong Kong Arts Centre all this month. (Check the web site: http://www.ifva.com/2009/en/festival/ Ignore the 2009 date in the address.  That’s merely indicative of the amount of attention to publicity HK’s arts organizations have, especially on the English language side)

Besides that, as far as I can tell, nothing much is happening right this moment. If you know otherwise, please tell me, preferably before the event.

I have been away teaching screenwriting in Singapore. Maybe the main news I have is that Singapore is buzzing with activity for screenwriters. They of course think Hong Kong is buzzing, and maybe if you speak Chinese you will get a sense of Hong Kong being a bigger city than Singapore, but for this English speaker if no one else it is Singapore that appears the bigger and more active city.

There I am feted, pitched to, offered contracts, and paid money. Whatever projects I set up there, happen. It is simple. Here, despite promises and even contracts - well, I won’t bore you with tales of flaky Hong Kongers, you know it all too well. You might even be a flake yourself.   

Now, Singaporean movies have not exactly set the world ablaze, as yet, whereas Hong Kong has made a place for itself on the International stage. Hong Kong’s film industry might now lie in a heap under some tarpaulin in Shanghai but Singapore has not as yet risen to any heights! However, they have strong active government backing and that has always been the means of creating a local industry in the face of Hollywood competition.  Hong Kong’s own government is hardly doing anything more than providing a rather complicated and not particularly helpful loan system.  

When Singapore’s industry will mature is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime Singapore dreams and schemes, and is making headway in the Television industry. Local film industries give local cultures some space in the cinema, win prizes, but rarely make much money. Whereas television, or should I say multi-platform media content nowadays, is where the big bucks are. You need the complete financial resources of a small European country to make Avatar, but you need little more than a sofa and a camcorder to create popular TV.

If you look closely on the cable and broadband services you will see emerging English language shows made in the region. Creaky chat shows, product placement led magazine shows, and reworkings of Mr. Burnet’s reality shows with Asian characteristics, might not exactly be cutting edge stuff, but it is bringing in the punters, and developing skill sets and organizational frameworks that foster Singapore’s growing confidence in their media output. Next stop, drama and comedy shows!

Which brings me to Webisodes! Singapore, if the number of courses and conferences on multi-media content taking place there is anything to go on, is interested in these miniature shows. They are very niche oriented and beginning to make money. Some of them are very good. They are well written and well produced on tiny budgets and the audience for them is beginning to be analyzed and better understood. Here, maybe, is a place where Singapore can test drama and comedy without as many corporate or political constraints and gradually move them to the broadcast space.

One sees very little activity in this area in Hong Kong. Here an independent production company is usually making corporate video and dreaming of the day they might make a feature. If everywhere else on the planet is anything to go by, a local feature film industry just cannot exist without strong Government subsidy so those dreams are unlikely to reach fruition. And as for an English language independent film industry in Hong Kong, one should perhaps recognize that this is not exactly on any government committee’s agenda.

It is hard to adjust one’s thinking from dreams of Auteurship or just plain Hollywood, to dreams of being exalted on Youtube, but maybe that really is the only place where Hong Kong’s indy sector can flourish. Anyone else with any thought on these matters? Sounds like a good topic for a debate. I might even organize one for us.