Take-5: 46th HKIFF ’22
It’s taken a while, but the HOng KOng INternational Film Festival is back, in a truncated, curious, hybrid form, August 15-31. that said, there’s still a few Must-sees.
You may not realise it, but the Hong Kong International Film Festival, first run in 1976, is the oldest event of its kind in Asia-Pacific. Older than Tokyo (founded in 1985), older than Busan (1996), older than Shanghai (1993) and Beijing (2011), and the same age as the second youngest of the big five, Toronto (Sundance kicked off in 1978). But it’s never quite reached the buzzy heights it should have by now. Maybe it’s the lack of star power. Maybe it’s the lack of a “home,” like the Palais, the Palast, or the Palace (do you see a theme here?). We all know censors will be a challenge going forward. But it’s our fest, and still one of the best ways to get a peek at emerging, cutting edge, wave-making cinema from around the world. And we’re talking about a normal year, not COVID-influenced ones. 45th and 46th are outliers.
Out of 200-odd films (normally closer to 300) what five would we watch? For starters, skip the opening local entries, Philip Yung’s “problematic” Where the Wind Blows – the same one that experienced “technical difficulties” at HKIFF45 – and Ng Yuen-fai’s Warriors of Future. That’s not a diss, but save your precious picks for stuff that’s not opening soon. And maybe skip stuff that’s already streaming (unfortunately, a fair amount). So what’s left? Read on.
Get full programme details, updates on extra screenings – fingers crossed, a lot was sold by the end of first day sales – and purchase tickets at www.hkiff.org.hk.
To My nineteen-Year-Old Self
| Director: Mabel Cheung, Hong Kong |
Section: Gala
Veteran new wave director Mabel Cheung returns to her old stomping grounds at Ying Wa Girls’ School for an epic document of a group of young women’s maturation in the shadow of the century-old school’s demolition for reconstruction. Following the girls since 2011 and coinciding with one of the most turbulent stretches in Hong Kong history, Cheung paints an unfiltered and intimate portrait of a generation coming of age at time of tremendous uncertainty with sensitivity, clarity, and her signature honesty. And she does it in 30 fewer minutes than Richard Linklater did in Boyhood, and says way more.
Crimes of the Future
| Director: David Cronenberg, Canada/Greece | Section: The Masters (III)
Admittedly, Crimes of the Future isn’t among body horror master David Cronenberg’s best films – those being Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners (that’s how to explode a head), Videodrome, maybe Crash – but decent Cronenberg is better than many filmmakers’ best. Re-teaming with current muse/leading man/alter ego Viggo Mortensen for the fourth time, this is a cryptic, ahem, dissection of the concepts of the human body as the final frontier of performance venues and physical transformation as art. The undefined future of the film is a bleak landscape of urban decay and mutated flesh and inside of 12 minutes we’re treated to an ungodly … contraption. Never change, Mr Cronenberg. Never change.
Mad God
| Director: Phil Tippett, USA
| Section: Animation Unlimited (III)
Yes, this is available on streamer Shudder, but practical special effects titan Phil Tippett’s (Star Wars, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Jurassic Park) 30 years-in-the-making stop-motion animation waking nightmare is a visual feast that is best served up on the biggest screen you can find. Mad God is a cautionary tale of military radicalism, environmental collapse, and our collective, seemingly inherent inhumanity that’s also a massive trip. An assassin takes a creaky diving bell into a pit of degradation to try and save the world and walks into a dystopia as has rarely been seen so explicitly. As heartbreaking as it is gory.
Peter von Kant
| Director: François Ozon, France | Section: Cinephile Paradise
What’s a film festival without a little psychosexual François Ozon hijinks? The eminently watchable Denis Ménochet (in a career-best performance) and Isabelle Adjani star in a “freely adapted,” gender-swapped retelling of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and spins the tortured lesbian melodrama into a near-farce of gay male obsession. In this version, Peter is a filmmaker and bon vivant in Cologne totally smitten with a much younger budding actor (Khalil Gharbia). In grand Ozon way, it all goes badly. If Fassbinder isn’t quite queer enough for you, Ozon is here to help.
Nitram
| Director: Justin Kurzel, Australia | Section: Cinephile Paradise
One of cinema’s greatest powers is its ability to shine a light on the darkest corners of our world and wake people the fuck up about shit going sideways. Look at the government in Zimbabwe banning the documentary President. The film won’t incite riots, but it will expose the corruption of the last three decades. Nitram doesn’t need to expose the urgent need for gun control and the agony of gun violence; it tells just one story that reminds us all just how pressing the issue remains. Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) is stellar in a chronicle of Tasmania’s 1996 Port Arthur massacre and an attempt to understand the why and how of it. Not a film to “enjoy,” but a sensitive look at a watershed moment.