The Asian entries at this year's Venice Film Festival might not have made an award-winning impression on the jury and foreign critics, but the festival still served its purpose as a major platform for mainstream filmmakers from the region - and particularly Hong Kong.
Despite not winning any major awards at Saturday night's closing ceremony at the Sala Grande, Asian cinema remained the focus of this year's selection, thanks to festival director Marco Muller, who has deep connections with Hong Kong and Chinese cinema.
Hong Kong filmmakers made some noise with four entries, which were all commercial productions. Curtain-raiser Tsui Hark's martial arts fantasy Seven Swords and closer Peter Chan Ho-sun's Perhaps Love, a cross-over between musical and traditional narrative drama, targeted broad audiences rather than the art house.
Everlasting Regret, by Stanley Kwan Kam-pang's Everlasting Regret, a drama set against the backdrop of the history of modern China and starring Sammi Cheng Sau-man, won the arts communications award. Then there was the screen adaptation of Japanese road-racing comic Initial D, by Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak Siu-fai, shown in the out-of-competition section. South Korean director Park Chan-wook wowed audiences with his controversial Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, a box-office success back home. Hayao Miyazaki became the first animation director to be awarded a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (see interview above). Cult Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano was invited to present his Takeshi's as the festival's 'surprise film'.
Golden Lion winner Ang Lee says Venice has been an 'auteur film festival', but more commercial Asian releases were screened this year. Chan, who led the cast of Perhaps Love to bring down the curtain on the festival, says China's emergence as one of the world's greatest economies may have influenced this year's selection. Such an impact will continue at other major film festivals around the globe, he says.
And the prominence of directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige might have a lot to do with China's increasing openness. 'In the past, films shown at international film festivals were limited to art house,' Chan says. 'But this time, most Asian films are commercial releases. They're no longer alternative. If you simply add Italian subtitles to these films, even the Italians wouldn't find them hard to understand.
