Nearly a year has passed, but Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting can still recall the day when she and her partner, Alex Law Kai-yui, returned to Hong Kong from the Berlin International Film Festival, on February 22, 2010. They were shepherded, with much fanfare, from airport immigration control to a meeting room packed with photographers and journalists - who gave them a heroes' welcome. There followed a protracted photo shoot alongside actors Simon Yam Tat-wah, Sandra Ng Kwan-yue, the eight-year-old Buzz Chung and, most importantly, the Crystal Bear trophy they won for their film, Echoes of the Rainbow.
Cheung says the hustle and bustle took her 'by surprise'. It contrasted sharply with the limited attention she and Law attracted when they first left for Germany a fortnight previously. 'It was a film which left even our publicists puzzled - it's quite a difficult film to market,' says Cheung, who produced the intimate, small-budget film which adapted director Law's childhood experiences in the 1960s into a rite-of-passage tale about a young boy (played by Chung) growing up in a shoemaker's family.
'There was no epic romance in there. I'd say it is more like prose in parts ... so the Crystal Bear did come in very handy indeed. It helped generate a lot of headlines for us.'
As this year's Berlin festival concludes today, Cheung - again in Germany, this time as part of an international jury at the Generation Kplus section which hosted Echoes last year - can look back on a year in which film festival success has reignited a career that has stalled somewhat for a decade.
She says her next project - an epic drama about a group of people who journey from the crisis-ridden mainland to the relatively peaceful Hong Kong during the 1940s and 50s - was green-lit by her investors partly because of Echoes' success.
Meanwhile, Echoes has performed much better than expected during its two-month run in local cinemas, generating HK$23.1 million - making it the third highest-grossing Hong Kong film shown in local cinemas in 2010 and eighth in the rundown for all movies released during the year, beating even Clash of the Titans and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.