Jointly hosted by five media and entertainment organisations from Macau and mainland China, the inaugural edition of the weeklong Asia-Europe Festival of Young Cinema kicked off on Friday at the Emperor Cinemas of Lisboeta Macau in Cotai.
The festival runs until this Friday, with the aim of fostering a platform for cultural exchanges between East and West, and for dialogues between the older and younger generations of filmmakers, according to a statement released by the organisers on Friday.
The week-long festival is set to screen a total of 27 films and 17 “works-in-progress” [unfinished films] created by young film directors from the Chinese-speaking world. The statement said that the event also includes various educational “masterclasses” and on-stage dialogues, each delivered by leading filmmakers including Ning Hao and Li Dongmei from the mainland, Yon Fan from Hong Kong, as well as Japan’s Ryosuke Hamaguchi and Shinya Tsukamoto, Russia’s Aleksey German Jr, Italy’s Gabriel Menetti, India’s Anrag Kashyap, the Philippines’ Lav Diaz, and Iran’s Amir Naderi.
Day one of the event featured a gala screening of Ning Hao’s “The Movie Emperor” and Yon Fan’s “Bugis Street”. Today, the festival will screen Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist”, a movie that had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, the statement said, adding that Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “12th Fail”, a recently released Indian Hindi-language biographical movie, would screen as the closing film on Friday.
Addressing the opening ceremony, Marco Müller, artistic director of the festival, who is known for having been involved in the organisation of the Venice Film Festival, said that he hoped to build a bridge between young Chinese filmmakers and the international market through this event. He underlined that Macau has historically been a venue for international cultural exchanges, making it one of the most ideal Chinese territories for setting up a film festival.
The Rome-born film producer added that the festival targets specifically young attendees, such as filmmaking beginners and film school students, in order to make it easier for them to break into the international market, while at the same time learning from industrial “veterans” from around the world.
More information regarding the schedule of “masterclasses” and on-stage dialogues (tickets priced at 50 patacas each) is available on the Lisboeta’s Emperor Cinema website: https://www.emperorcinemas.com/zh/ticketing/by_movie.
The festival’s artistic director, Marco Müller (right) and the director of “The Movie Emperor”, Ning Hao, address the opening ceremony of the Asia-Europe Festival of Young Cinema on Friday at the Emperor Cinemas of Lisboeta Macau in Cotai.
– Photo: Maria Cheang Ut Meng
