Imitation of LIfe
The 2023 edition of Movie Movie’s in-house micro-film festival zeroes in on artists, designers and creators that are changing the world. Or did.
It may seem like producer-distributor Edko’s MOViE MOViE is muscling in on M+’s territory with its Life is Art programme, this year a slate of 13 films, mostly docs, that chronicle, deconstruct, interrorgate or otherwise ponder art and design as it manifests in the world around us. First off, MOViE MOViE got there first, opening the Tai Koo cinema in 2018, and second, there’s plenty of room for both. Think of Life is Art as an easy introduction to M+’s more hard core avant garde programming. Baby steps.
This year’s edition, running November 23 to December 17, has been vaguely rebranded to reflect a collaboration with the Hong Kong Design Centre as a BODW-adjacent event. Life is Art. Design in Motion has a distinct focus on innovation for the future and designers and artists that could be considered game changers – like Canadian designer and advocate for “massive change” Bruce Mau, whose tireless efforts to get big business and big cities to sign on to more sustainble options are regularly shot down. Yet he soldiers on.
Making sense of all these visionaries – and talking about how these arts connect to us in real life – is a string of guests, some after screenings, some at separate workshops, who include co-founder of sustainable bag manufacturer Invisible Company Devena Ng; creative agency SONOVA founder Steven Tsoi; local kombucha brewer Taboocha founders, sisters Patricia and Lisa Lam; artisan stationer Donna Chan and Nicole Chan, founders of ditto ditto; production designer and Hong Kong Film Arts Association chair Man Lim-chung (Mama’s Affair); and singer, songwriter and actor Ivana Wong (Table for Six) among many others.
But most of us are here for the films, which kick off this year with Kevin Macdonald’s High & Low: John Galliano. Macdonald has regularly toggled between features (The Mauritanian) and docs (Touching the Void), and he’s no stranger to difficult subjects: 2018’s Whitney is one of the best portraits of the late singer going. Galliano, shall we say, is difficult. Many of us probably remember when the then-Dior creative director decided a drunken, anti-semitic freak-out aimed a group of Italian women in Paris in 2010 was a good idea. Naturally, a prompt canning by Dior followed in 2011. Galliano has the dubious distinction of being one of our earliest known cases of cancel culture (which is not a thing). Macdonald picks apart Galliano’s life and career, and also picks apart cancel culture, its meaning and whether careers can come back from it. Considering Mel Gibson has two films in the pipeline and Lethal Weapon 5 (!) is rumoured to be in development, and Galliano has gone on to Maison Margiela (since 2014) the answer is: Yes.
Closing this year is Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, Neo Sora’s concert film capturing the last concert Sakamoto performed before he died of cancer this past March. Sakamoto hand-picked the 20 songs he performs, viewing them as the ones that best encapsulated a career that included film scores (Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, High Heels, The Revenant), collaborations with David Sylvian and Youssou N'Dour, and two dozen albums of his own. He probably knew he was dying when he curated the playlist, which gives Opus an extra layer of pathos – kind of the way his Mr Lawrence co-star David Bowie’s Black Star did.
Elsewhere, if you missed the V&A’s gargantuan 2021 exhibition detailing the far-reaching influence of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, co-directors Dione Orrom and Matt Askem will take you through it in Alice – Curiouser and Curiouser. According to this show, Salvador Dali and Vivienne Westwood are among those who went down the rabbit hole. Benjamin and Jono Bergmann’s MAU may fit the programme brief best as a deep dive into the aforementioned designer. A can’t miss for urbanites and infrastructure junkies (they must be out there) is Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s Soviet Bus Stops, which is about exactly what it sounds like. Hegnsvad and his photographer Christopher Herwig spent seven year crossing 15 former Soviet states to get the stories behind the remaining bus stops and dig into what made them political statements as well as something to keep the snow off you.
And though it’s not quite the same thing, Kim Hopkins’s A Bunch of Amateurs recalls Air Guitar Nation, at least in indefatiguable spirit. The film about one of the UK’s oldest surviving amateur filmmakers’ clubs dishes some major props to the sometimes inept, always adoring non-professionals (think Ed Wood or Tommy Wiseau) making movies for all the right reasons. Amateurs documents the COVID-era attempts to keep it from shutting down for good. For anyone who loves movies, this is a must-see.
Rounding out the line-up is the other opening night film, David Bickerstaff’s Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition, the latest in the artist-filmmaker’s Exhibition on Screen series (this is your chance to visit the Rijksmuseum if you can’t get to Amsterdam); the Hong Kong Sinfonietta continues its wildly successful COVID-inspired alternative to traditional performance in Tiny Galaxy Concert @ Haw Par, directed by Stanley Ho; Florian Heinzen-Ziob unveils iconoclastic German ballet choreographer Pina Bausch’s process in Dancing Pina; Amanda Kim’s Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is a portrait of avant garde artist Nam, quite possibly the 20th century’s most cutting edge video artist – he practically invented the form – and a defence of his very, very long shadow; and for those who missed them, here’s another chance to catch local favourites Keep Rolling, Man Lim-chung’s doc about Hong Kong New Wave titan Ann Hui, and Hong Heng-fai’s Kissing The Ground You Walked On, which, as a film about life as performance, pretty much sums up the entire programme.
LIfe is Art. Design in MOtion
Where: MOViE MOViE Cityplaza; MOViE MOViE Pacific Place, Broadway Cinematheque; PALACE ifc; B+ cinema apm; Premiere Elements
Hours: November 23 to December 17, 2023
Closed: N/A
Details: Information at MOVIE MOVIE; MOViE MOViE on Facebook. Ticketing at www.cinema.com.hk.