THE Hong Kong International Film Festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a vastly expanded budget and a repertoire of films which breaks the 200 mark for the first time - but with only 300 screenings between March 25 and April 9, demand for tickets will be as high as ever.
While postal bookings for the festival have already closed and counter applications don't open until March 19, Urbtix is still accepting telephone reservations - although you can count on the opening, closing and gala presentations being sold out already.
With the budget stepped up from $4.9 million to $6.7 million, the Urban Council is celebrating the festival's birthday with a bound programme and more guests than ever before - Taiwan's Edward Yang has already confirmed he will present his closing film, Mahjong, along with Wu Tianming (The King of Masks ) and Zhang Yuan (Sons ).
It's a long way from the first Hong Kong International Film Festival - 36 films shown in the same venue. This year there are seven participating cinemas, including the Convention and Exhibition Centre, the Cultural Centre, the Arts Centre and the Space Museum. But the Urban Council has no plans to take the HKIFF further, by introducing a competition, for example - and the festival's very future is currently being debated in a wide-ranging five-year plan by the Urban Council Select Committee.
While the 21st HKIFF will take place before the handover, 'hopefully, by September or October we'll have a clearer picture of what the future holds post-1997', says Lo Tak-shing, senior manager of Urbco's Festivals Office.
But for now, the festival continues with its traditional focus on Asian cinema - this year's line-up includes a retrospective on Cantonese stars of the 1960s, a section devoted to Korean classics, a Hong Kong panorama from the past year, and a 22-film showcase of the best of Asian cinema. Israeli cinema comes under the spotlight with a four-film section, and an exciting 10-film sidebar highlights the best of Latin American motion picture-making.
The HKIFF has chosen film entrepreneur Shu Kei's second feature, Hu Du Men, starring Josephine Siao Fong-fong, as the opening film, followed by Roberto Rodriguez' treatment of Quentin Tarantino's story From Dusk Till Dawn, with two Asian movies closing the festival - Yang's Mahjong and The King of Masks, the first film from Wu Tianming since the former head of the Xian studio and mentor to Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou left China in the late 1980s.
