It began as a weekend screening at a 60-seat space in 2004. But this week, Jumping Frames, a biennial dance video festival, returns a bigger and more international event, showcasing 90 short films from around the world, simultaneously, in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou for more than a month.
'We want to do something interesting that no one has done before,' says Raymond Wong Kwok-wai, one of the two curators of this year's festival. 'I hope this event is.'
Opening the festival in Hong Kong on Thursday will be the world premiere of There is a Place, a collaboration between Tibetan-born choreographer Sang Jijia and British film director Katrina McPherson. The seven-minute dance video is a co-commission from the City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) and Glasgow-based dance centre Dance House that brought two internationally sought-after artists together.
'Last July the then artistic director of Dance House Karen Wood came to Guangzhou for the Modern Dance Festival [presented by the CCDC] and was exploring opportunities to work with mainland dancers in dance video,' says Wong, who is also CCDC's project manager.
'So we proposed Sang and they came up with Katrina for the project. In May, Sang went to Scotland for the shoot. It was CCDC's first international collaboration of this kind.'
The video is based on improvisation - a modus operandi familiar to both artists who hit it off straight away. 'The filmmaking took only five days and the end result shows two similar mindsets at work,' says Wong. 'They will reunite this month and both will collaborate again, this time in Beijing.'