All were present at the symposium for the screenings of their films, interacting with scholars and students from all over the world, turning the symposium into a rare space where theory could be transformed into practice. While the papers given at the symposium focused on the thematic links between Hong Kong and Hollywood, the films were tied together by their border crossing directors, and while some of them dealt with Chinese diasporic issues, on the whole they represented a wider range of issues. Many experiment with and challenge conventional media, while others highlight characters that do not normally receive treatment in more "mainstream" filmic spaces. Overwhelmingly, the films provide an alternative social commentary antithetical to the Hollywood and Hong Kong commercial models. Videotage, an artist collective
that aims to develop and showcase video and new media art in Hong Kong, curated a shorts
program featuring the work of long time collaborator and Videotage Artistic Director Ellen
Pau and Board Member Fion Ng. Both artists were present to lead a lively discussion about
their work as well as HK’s experimental and alternative media arts scene. Ellen
Pau’s Song of the Goddess is a beautifully composed and lyrical piece that
explores the intimate relationship of Yam Kim-Fai and Pak Suet-Sin, the famous female duo
who played the role of lovers in classical Cantonese operas. Moved by Pak’s grief at
Yam’s funeral, in which she says, "I would die a hundred times to bring you back
to me", Pau pays tribute to their love by telling the tale of dying a hundred times,
all the while experimenting with and pushing the limits of the techniques available to her
in order to capture the complexity of their relationship.
 [Let's Love Hong Kong]
Nomadic Vision is a futuristic experimental short film which made its debut at the Hong Kong Biennial earlier this year. In preparing the piece, video artists Hector Rodriguez and Mike Wong studied how the human eye communicates with the brain when perceiving visual images, and then attempted to create an algorithm which would generate an image which would disturb the natural path of perception. The result is a dark form, which sometimes resembles a box, a room, a flat open floor, but never a fixed object which the eye can focus on for any reasonable length of time. As part of the symposium, Rodriguez carefully reconstructed the algorithm and decoded its complex web of trajectories in front of the audience present at the screening. Crystal Kwok’s screening of The Mistress follows up on a daring exploration of female sexuality in Hong Kong. The Mistress tells the story of Alex (Jacqueline Peng), who is hired by a rich businessman, Henry (Ray Lui), to give private English lessons to his mistress Michelle (Vicky Chen). Alex becomes more sexually daring as she goes lingerie shopping with Michelle and participates in S/M parties and other fetish activities introduced to her by Michelle. Before long, she is entangled in a love affair with Henry and becomes his mistress. However, she also wants Henry’s love, which he could not give. She becomes depressed and self-destructive when rejected by him. In the end, she heals with the help of Michelle.  Unlike popular portrayals of
victimized concubines or demonized mistresses, The Mistress is an innovative look
at female desire from a female perspective, peppered throughout with scenes of female
sexual fantasies including heterosexual scenarios, fetish activities and moments of
same-sex desire. It features rare instances where women talk to each other about sex.
Drawing on the themes of the HK/Hollywood symposium, Kwok, a diasporic filmmaker who grew
up in the States but now works in HK, represents women’s issues in Hong Kong in other
border-crossing ways as well, through Asian American lens in the figure of Alex, who is
American-educated and her friends, who appear to be American-educated or Asian American,
and through the lens of Michelle, the atypical mistress from the Mainland. (See the Interview with Crystal Kwok)
The film program also featured a few documentaries, which like the alternative media scene, is often relegated to the shadows of HK commercial cinema. July, produced by Tammy Cheung, is a documentary about the July 2003 public protests in Hong Kong against the national security bill, Article 23 of the Basic Law, introduced by the Chinese Central Government. Cheung uses direct cinema to capture the spirit of the protests, mostly focusing on the July 1st protest, which drew the largest crowd of about 500,000. Despite a limited crew, Cheung and her team pieced together the personal interactions, crowds, speeches, songs, chants, posters and banners that together told the story of what happened during those protests. Without delving too deeply into the historical and political context of the protests, Cheung’s emphasis seems to be on the overwhelming atmosphere of dissatisfaction of HK people with the HK SAR government and the Chinese Central government and a communal desire for self-governance. Subverting the tendency of mainstream media to depict this struggle through the voices of government officials and prominent civic leaders and organizers, July is much more concerned with street politics, everyday personal interactions, the immense amount of energy and work everyone put in to make the protests a success and behind the scenes negotiations and strategizing amongst organizers. Cheung also shows us glimpses of the views of those opposed to the protests, not because they are pro-government but because the struggle for democracy remains more concerned with middle class interests than those of the working poor.  Aptly closing the symposium is East Meets East, a
documentary co-produced by Kevin Feng Ke and Kalli Paakspuu. East Meets East
features interviews with Chinese American filmmakers about their struggles and experiences
crossing borders as filmmakers, whether these borders are between locations East and West,
working in mainstream vs. independent industries, or personal understandings of self and
politics. Important to these filmmakers are issues of identity, assimilation,
authenticity, and the politics of representation.
Filmmaker Kevin Feng Ke also screened his short and Asia premiere, The Official Account, a fictional narrative that tells the story of news reporters on the night of the Tiananmen Square masscres, their struggles between the demands of the state to report the state’s false account of the event and their commitment to ethical news reporting. Ke appeals to the viewer’s sympathy for the plight of these individuals as well as their courage in standing up to the state machinery that crushed these students. According to the filmmaker, the film is based on true and previously untold stories. Evans Chan sneak-previewed his Sorceress of the New Piano before it was to debut at the Hong Kong International Film Festival later that week. The film, an exploration of the extraordinary life of acclaimed Singapore-born pianist Margaret Leng Tan, features numerous musical interludes and interviews with Tan and those closest to her. We asked Gina Marchetti about some of her programming choices and particularly about Sorceress of the New Piano. According to Marchetti, this film is distinctive as a documentary because Margaret Leng Tan talks about the "three C’s" of avant-garde composers for the piano—Henry Cowell, George Crumb, and John Cage—all white, all male, all Western. However, this history of the "great men" of the twentieth century piano only tells part of the story. As Chan’s documentary shows, this modernist musical tradition has always been in conversation with Asia (particularly with percussive traditions like the gamelan) and has always depended on collaboration with gifted performers to find nuances within the written musical scores. Growing up immersed in the varied musical traditions of Singapore that include Malaysian, Chinese, Indian, and Western classical musical forms, Tan has the background to hear elements in the piano pieces she performs that may be lost on other pianists. A remarkably physical performer, Tan embodies the music, manipulating every key, every string, and every piece of wood on the piano to uncover the drama and passion at the heart of avant-garde music. For Tan, who meticulously spends hours finding the right screw or the exact pick to "prepare" the piano for her concerts, this music lives in performance, and Tan embodies the fact that avant-garde music is international, multicultural, Asian as well as Western, female as well as male. Just as Tan opens up this world to new audiences by playing Beatles’ tunes on toy pianos, Chan’s film promises to bring Tan’s music to those who have never considered the importance of Asians, Asian Americans, and women within the musical avant-garde.
In Macau, Chan presided over a screening of his 2000 feature Adeus Macau, a tribute to the ambivalence of the Macanese people on the eve of the Macau’s handover to China in December 1999. Although the Portugese colonized Macau for 400 years, they seem to have left little in terms of political or cultural legacy to the Macanese people. Chan took questions from the audience and participated in a lively banter about the politics of the film after the screening. Participants were also treated to a hodgepodge of short films from Macau filmmakers, many of whom presently work in the TV and film industry in the territory. From Bianca Lei’s playful Won Ton Noodles…I Love It! to the elegant tribute to one of Macau’s artistic masters Goodbye Kwok Woon, the audience was able to get a sense of the incredible diversity of the Macanese video art community. Many of the short films presented dealt with the handover of Macau, and provided a playful contrast to the documentary approach of Chan’s film. Taiwan Video Club is Lin’s effort to explore her mother’s relationship to her homeland of Taiwan through the tape recording of popular Taiwanese TV shows and movies. The result is a mixture of interviews with her mother and overlaid video footage, which Lin explained was to highlight the recycled aspect of her mother’s practice; often tapes would be reused and played over and over again, diminishing the quality of the picture. The film is an interesting interpretation of the transnational travel of popular culture.
Lin also screened her 2001 documentary No Power to Push Up the Sky, a revisiting of the infamous speech delivered by Chinese activist Chai Ling on the eve of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. In it, Chai used a controversial Chinese phrase which was translated into the English television media as "we hope for bloodshed." She insists to this day that she did not mean to insinuate this, but the debate over her phrasing continues to loom in the historical legacy of Tiananmen. Three boxes appear on the screen throughout Lin’s piece. In one, a rotating cast of translators reads through Chai Ling’s speech while simultaneously translating it in front of the camera. Their interpretations vary widely, exposing the inadequacies and inaccuracies of translation. One other box remains blank while the newspaper headlines leading up to the massacre flash through the third. At the end, we see footage from Chai Ling’s interview with Charlie Rose, which happened several years after the incident, well after Chai’s immigration to the United States. In it, she repeatedly asserts that she did not mean to say "hope". Lin’s piece is a powerful dissection of the western media surrounding what remains such a controversial and sensitive topic.
Roger Garcia brought us a rare glimpse into the experimental film scene in Hong Kong in the 1980s in a screening of work by Jim Shum, Raymond Red, and Comyn Mo. Though it is not very well known, this scene ran parallel to the more famous Hong Kong New Wave, which focused on feature films, and produced many famous industry names such as Roger Garcia himself. Although he has gone on to produce large commercial features, Garcia remains committed to preserving the legacy of the experimental film scene in Hong Kong. He was for many years involved in the San Francisco Film Festival, and some say that he was responsible for introducing Hong Kong New Wave to the United States, an important step in showing the world’s film festival circuit that Hong Kong had more to offer than kung-fu films. The films screened at the symposium are beautiful, quiet expressions of everyday Hong Kong.
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