Film festival openings in Hong Kong are usually exuberant affairs - and there have already been quite a few this month. The Goethe Institut's MAX! opened two weeks ago at the Hong Kong Arts Centre with its usual champagne-filled panache. Film buffs have also been congregating at the Hong Kong Film Archive for Ivan's Childhood - the first screenings of the Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective at the Science Museum. And the Western China Film Festival opened with respectful audiences admiring heroic deeds in The Swordsman in Double-Flag Town. Compared with such pomp, one might not expect a film showing inside a tattered Mongkok office block to be the curtain-raiser for one of Hong Kong's most invigorating cinematic events. But that's how the Social Movement Film Festival kicked off at the headquarters of the Hong Kong Federation of Students on October 16, with about 30 people watching A Place Called Chiapas, Nettie Wild's documentary about the Zapatista rebels in the southern tip of Mexico. Screenings for the past week have been held beside the swimming pool at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK); in a small cafe in an apartment block on Mongkok's Sai Yeung Choi Street; and in the office of a cultural association in Yau Ma Tei. The festival will continue for the next four weeks in venues as varied as university class-rooms, a mezzanine bookshop in Shamshuipo and the cluttered office of the festival organisers, the Federation of Students' Social Movement Research Centre. Most of the films - from features to documentaries shot on digital video - touch on gritty, grass-roots struggles. The directors of the local offerings are also ardent campaigners for similar issues, while the few pieces from overseas are strong statements of intent from directors sympathetic to social causes. Examples include Ken Loach's The Navigators, a thinly veiled critique against Britain's rail privatisation, and The Child of the Moon, a documentary by Taiwanese director-cum-social worker Wu Ti-feng about the discrimination levelled against people with no colour pigment in their skin. The festival is itself part of a social movement, with every screening followed by a seminar chaired by social activists, unionists or academics. The aim is to stimulate discussion and action. 'It's not only about how to show the film, but how we could connect them with what's happening in Hong Kong,' says Benny Chan Yin-kai, a former student at the CUHK and one of the festival co-ordinators. 'Stuff would seem so distant from our lives if no one provides that linkage.' This Saturday's screening of the documentary Haojie - about underpaid factory workers in Dongguan - will be followed by a discussion led by Pun Ngai, an assistant professor in social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She spent six months working in an electronics factory in Shenzhen as part of a study of labour practices on the mainland. Hui Siu-ying from Hong Kong Women Worker Association is the guest speaker after The Navigators, while members of the pressure group Urban Renewal Monitor will discuss their views after Man On and Tin Cheung, a documentary about the struggle of two shopkeepers against property developers. The festival stems from regular film screenings the Social Movement Research Centre has organised over the past four years. 'We had weekly events here and we did make quite a few documentaries ourselves as a way of social participation,' says Chan. Events have included conventional film shows at the centre's offices, and open-air screenings at the pedestrian area on Sai Yeung Choi Street - which involves organisers ferrying the centre's television cabinet and some chairs several blocks down Nathan Road. 'We realised there's potential for a festival based on films that touch on hard social issues, and that's how the first festival came into being in February this year,' he says. Most of the organisers are documentary-makers themselves. Cat Mak Ka-lui, who studies digital media at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, made a documentary about how police removed demonstrators from the front piazza of the Central Government Offices on April 1. Mak hopes to offer perspectives that aren't apparent in the media. 'My film was about civil rights and also how the police exercised their powers,' she says. 'Television news coverage, however, concentrated on journalistic freedom - probably because some journalists were shoved by police officers. Nobody mentioned much about why we were there in the first place.' Her fellow festival workers agree. 'It's all about portraying conflict in the news,' says Sue Yeung Yuk-sau, an undergraduate in cultural studies at Lingnan University. 'People don't talk about why it happened and what the consequences were. What we do could provide a vein for people to follow - to understand the whole event.' The Social Movement Film Festival. Ends Nov 28. Listings and venues available at www.smrc8a.org/smff
