Although Hong Kong is becoming more sophisticated as a film-viewing hub, there is still the sneaking suspicion that a lot is passing us by.
Yes, we now get the Venice Golden Lion winners and the year's top-grossing French films as a matter of course - but where is the eclectic Euro-fare - the frequently state-sponsored and heavily art-influenced films which do not win prizes and are rarely seen outside the Euro art-house-circuit? Look no further than Hong Kong's own European Film Festival, which this year is wonderfully idiosyncratic. The line-up itself is so much fun to read one suspects the films themselves may be a disappointment.
The programmers, who went out on a limb and sourced a series of 17 movies and videos based on music and dance, deserve to be congratulated.
This year's European Film Festival, jointly presented by the Arts Centre and the European Union's Working Group for Culture, marks a confidence in Hong Kong's maturing film tastes. The previous three European Film Festivals - as with other national programmes such as French Cinepanorama - have been much more orthodox in their line-up.
But this year the festival, which runs until November 29 at the Arts Centre's Lim Por Yen Theatre, is hopefully a sign of things to come.
The films are wide-ranging, running from the late Jacques Demi's 1954 classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to two films developed from modern dance productions, a semi-documentary from Austria on the great Nijinsky, two very different productions based on operas from Sweden and Norway, and a documentary about six female conductors from Russia.