“Echoes” May Herald Revival of the Hong Kong Film Industry

Hong Kong – It’s been credited with saving an historic neighbourhood from rapacious property development; now it’s heralded as a catalyst for resurrecting Hong Kong’s once booming film industry.

Photographs by Marco Lui

Echoes of the Rainbow by Alex Law and Mabel Cheung (pictured right) won the Crystal Bear Award at the Berlinale Film Festival on February 2, the first time a Hong Kong film won the category since it was introduced in 1978. It went on to sweep four prizes in the Hong Kong Film Awards in April, including the best screenplay and best actor.

Supported by the Hong Kong Film Development Council to the tune of HK$3.6 million ($462,390) in public money which helped fund its production in late 2008, the movie tells the tale of a shoemaker’s family set in the 1960s.

And now many hope Echoes may mark the revival of “Made in Hong Kong” films and a return to the golden days of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Echoes proved that Hong Kong could still produce high quality movies that can reach to global audience,” said Wellington Fung, secretary-general of the Film Development Council. “After a lost decade in Hong Kong’s film industry, we are now experiencing an awakening phrase.”

Hong Kong could still produce high quality movies, Fung said.

Less than 20 years ago, the city was renowned as the leading film production hub in Asia. Local actors and actresses such as Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan and Maggie Cheung became household names locally — and  internationally.

From modern romances to gunfire gangster fights, Hong Kong film-makers churned out an average of 120 to 150 movies every year in 1980s, Fung said. The industry boom peaked in 1993, when about 240 films were released — [there were] two new movies showing in cinemas every three days, he said.

“Producers thought people would always come to watch the movies no matter what they were about and how they were like,” said Fung, who co-founded the Media Asia Group, a major movie production company in Hong Kong, in 1994.

“The market was completely saturated and the production quality turned bad. Audiences started losing confidence in Hong Kong movies.”

In 2008, Hong Kong film-makers produced only 54 movies.

In an attempt to boost production of Hong Kong movies, the government set up a HK$300 million Film Development Fund in July 2007 to provide as much as HK$3.6 million for “small-and-medium” projects with budgets not exceeding HK$12 million. The Film Development Council, which manages the fund, raised the budget limit to HK$15 million in March this year and the contribution level to up to HK$5.25 million.

The council has received 23 applications since the launch and approved 13 of them, including Echoes of the Rainbow, according to figures as of April 9. Total funding has reached HK$35.3 million.

Production of Echoes, scripted 10 years earlier based on Alex Law’s experiences of growing  up in Hong Kong, could not have happened without government’s financial support, the director said in  a sharing session at The University of Hong Kong in April.

“The idea was rejected by producers. They said ‘no one would like to watch your childhood memory on big screen’,” Law said.

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Timeline of Echoes of the Rainbow

Another objective of the fund is to kick-start the career of potential directors.

“Filmmakers with less experience often have difficulties in convincing investors to put money in their projects, because they don’t have much profile yet,” Fung said. “The fund acts like an initiator — gives support to their debut so that they can build reputation and secure private investment on their own later.”

Crossing Hennessy did not need public funds

He quoted Ivy Ho, a two-time screenplay award-winner who directed her first movie in 2008 with the public funding, as a “successful example”.

Ho’s debut, Claustrophobia, received HK$1.6 million from the Film Development Fund. Crossing Hennessy, her second film released this year, did not require financial support from the government. She was able to raise sufficient private funding, Fung said.

New movie production start-ups increased 31 per cent to 71 films last year, a sign that the industry was expanding again. As more and more directors are recognized by audience locally and internationally, Fung believed that the “golden age” of Hong Kong movies will return one day, benefiting from a growing viewership in Guangdong Province, China.

“The worst of times for the Hong Kong film industry is over,” he said. “We don’t need to aim at the whole Chinese market. Guangdong itself has more than 90 million Cantonese-speaking people, more than enough for the movies to survive.”