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Stephen McCarty

Roger Garcia speaks “terrible” Italian.
And that is after 20-plus years of attending the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) in Udine, Italy, from where, by video call, the affable Hong Kong filmmaker, talking new Asian talent, premieres, the growing influence of streaming platforms and more, cheerfully delivers his confession.
The FEFF has long been one of the most important channels for the promotion of Asian cinema throughout Europe.
This spring’s jamboree, its 26th, feted Zhang Yimou with an honorary gong and screened the world premieres of restored editions of his movies Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and To Live (1994).


And unusually for Garcia, this festival would afford him the rare opportunity to be consumer, not facilitator.
“Usually I put together a programme showing Asian and Western films, with interaction between the two, like inspirations or remakes,” he says. “But we couldn’t work out this year’s programme because of some of the rights. So I’m able to watch films for once.
“I also help out here as a kind of mentor. Ten or so film projects are brought in every year by producers. I meet them; we discuss their plans. I’m there to help them make their films more marketable – if they accept my ideas!”

“Godfather” Garcia also plays a similar but more far-reaching role closer to home.
“I’ve just finished [an inaugural] film camp at Sands China, in Macau – the International Film Camp, run by the Asian Film Awards Academy [AFAA], of which I used to be the head,” he says.
“In Macau, film festivals are held with varying degrees of success. But they do year-round programmes and I thought it better to bring people in for a purpose, on something like a talent campus,” he says.
“I had the idea of a film camp for young filmmakers from all over Asia; and to make it a more concrete experience they would come with short film projects. With mentors they would develop them, then pitch to a selection panel.
“We had 550 applications – I anticipated about 100 – and 16 filmmakers came to the camp. Half of them got HK$300,000 [US$38,500] each to make their short film.”

Which sounds brutal for the unlucky one in two.
“Quite tough, yes,” agrees Garcia.
“But rejection is about 90 per cent of the job in filmmaking. The International Film Camp will now oversee the production of the eight short films and help get them shown, at festivals or through the AFAA programme.”
Garcia has twice served as executive director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society and was “the artistic director of the Hainan International Film Festival for a couple of years”, he adds.
He describes the Hainan events as “well resourced”, which could help explain his recruitment of actors Johnny Depp and Isabelle Huppert, among other notable guests.
Festival programming and consulting aside, Garcia is also a producer; one of his Tinseltown projects was the early Mark Wahlberg outing The Big Hit (1998).


“I produced avant-garde films in Hong Kong in the 1980s, then Hollywood movies in the late 90s, where I was also a kind of ghost writer: you get small credits, which don’t pay a thing!” he says.
More recent work has returned him to the region. “I wrote the original treatment for and produced multimedia show The Once and Future, for which we shot the movie [component] in Argentina with Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua.
“We had Indian singer Anandi Bhattacharya on stage with the ZeMu! Ensemble – drawn from the Berlin Philharmonic – for its world premiere, at the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2022. Then it was presented at last year’s New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong,” he says.
Garcia is now working as the producer of a documentary on the artist Wifredo Lam.
“He’s the subject of a current exhibition at the Asia Society in Hong Kong,” says Garcia. “He was born in Cuba in 1902 to a southern Chinese father and a mother from Cuba, of Congolese ancestry, [making him] Chinese-African-Cuban. He knew Picasso and fought in the Spanish civil war against the fascists.
“He was a painter, ceramicist and the only artist of colour who participated in two of the most important movements of the 20th century: cubism and surrealism,” says Garcia. “So he’s really relevant today because he was multicultural – and should have been a Wilfredo, but his father made a mistake on his birth certificate!”

As far as streaming goes, Garcia is keenly aware of the opportunities a big-budget series, for example, could eventually offer his young filmmakers, even if they start out on short movies.
He helped Filipino director Raymond Red sell his 2000 Cannes Palme d’Or-winning short Anino to “AtomFilms, one of the first kind of streaming companies”. And there, Garcia saw the future.
Twenty years ago, “short films were a really good medium for streaming”, he says. “Before high-speed broadband, you couldn’t stream a feature film easily, but you could a short.
“I’ve been involved with short films since the early 80s and I’ve seen the market change – and streaming is all-pervasive now.”


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So you want to make a movie? Hong Kong director Roger Garcia is helping young filmmakers from all over Asia find their feet

Roger Garcia is helping the next generation of Asian filmmakers find their feet. Photo: courtesy of Roger Garcia

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Anandi Bhattacharya in The Once and Future world premiere at the Singapore International Festival of the Arts in 2022. Photo: Roger Garcia

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As a mentor, Hong Kong director Roger Garcia helps producers make their films more marketable. He’s launched a film camp for young filmmakers from all over Asia
He talks to the Post about the evolution of streaming, why ‘rejection is about 90 per cent of the job in filmmaking’ and the work he did in the 1980s and 1990s


Hong Kong director Roger Garcia talks about promoting Asian cinema, why ‘rejection is about 90 per cent of the job in filmmaking’, and how he is helping the next generation of filmmakers find their feet.


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