Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival 2008

This year is the 100th anniversary of Hong Kong cinema. Films were shot in the colony by foreign cameramen as early as 1898, but it was a Russian-American, Benjamin Brodsky, who hired theatre director Lian Shaobo to make two comic shorts, Right A Wrong With Earthenware Dish (Wa Pen Shen Yuan) and Stealing a Roasted Duck (Tou Shao Ya). Lian Shaobo later joined two brothers, Li Minwei and Li Beihai, in the Minxin Company in Hong Kong and made the first HK feature, Rouge (Yanzhi, 1925). The fledgling era quickly formed a complex web, with Shanghai’s maturing industry and with the U.S., where Chinese-American filmmakers Kwan Manching and Chiu Ahu-sun first founded Hong Kong’s pioneering Grandview studio. These inaugural developments foreshadowed the pragmatic commercialism that would drive Hong Kong cinema’s success in post-war Asia. Mandarin-speaking mainland studio veterans then joined in competition with Cantonese studios, and Hong Kong films dove headlong into the international arena. Commercial triumphs came soon with martial arts, urban stories, comedies and eventually a locally born art cinema that enabled a city of just six million to sustain the second largest film industry in Asia.

For two decades since the 1980s, Hong Kong filmmakers have faced severe challenges in the cinema marketplace. They have also achieved ever-wider international critical recognition.

This panel of critics, archivist-historians and film programmers will discuss the past and prospects of Hong Kong cinema -- 100 years after they started.

Panelists:
Sam Ho, head, Hong Kong Film Archive
Jessica Li, visiting fellow, York University
Raymond Phathanavirangoon, international programmer, Toronto International Film Festival and Reel Asian
Kenneth Bi, director of The Drummer

Moderator:
Bart Testa, professor of Cinema Studies, University of Toronto