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Jake Van Der Kamp

'I am confident that the HKFDC (Hong Kong Film Development Council) will be able to offer very useful advice to the Government to revive and promote the development of our film industry.'

Joseph Wong Wing-ping

Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology

And I am confident that it won't. We have the problem here, first of all, that this new council is to consist of 16 non-official members plus three direct government representatives.

You recognise the challenge - is it possible to sit 19 different people around one table, tell them they are meant to give useful advice to government and get agreement on anything more useful than that an apple a day keeps the doctor away?

You can get agreement, of course, if the three direct government representatives tell the other 16 what to advise and they then advise as instructed. But what you then have is not called a council of advisers. It is called the China People's  Political Consultative Conference.

The new film council's brief is more limited, however. It will only be asked how to revive and promote the local film industry and the scope of its advice has already been defined. It will be given HK$300 million to subsidise films and these subsidies must have a bias towards small and medium-sized enterprises.

Note here that Mr Wong spoke of reviving the film industry. Note also that in the film industry 'small' means home video and 'medium' means pornography. I wasn't aware that either of these two segments of the market needed reviving.

But the 16 non-official members of the council should be happy. With the exception of chairman Jack So Chak-kwong, one solicitor and one property manager, all of these people make their living from the film industry. Let us imagine ourselves at their first meeting, listening in to the discussion of the first item of business:

'Ladies and gentlemen, we have a motion on the table that we proceed as quickly as possible, and with as few questions as possible, to spend HK$300 million on small film companies run by film nobodies like ourselves. All in favour? Thank you. Meeting adjourned.'

Yes, I admit I could be wrong in suggesting that it would be difficult to get useful advice from a council like this. I was wrong in using the word 'useful'. Take that out and there is no difficulty getting advice at all.

Let me try my own hand at useful advice, however. Do you know that we recently did more to promote the film industry through one simple change in the fire regulations than the film council can ever do with its HK$300 million?

It's true. The fire regulations used to say that passageways to the street from fire exits in a cinema had to be dedicated to that cinema alone. No other fire exits could lead into such passageways.

This meant effectively that all cinemas had to be built at street level. To build a cinema on, let us say, a fifth floor and then build dedicated fire exits for it through all the lower floors would be prohibitively costly.

But street-level space in prime locations is also extremely valuable. Fashion shops will pay much higher floor rents for such space than any cinema operator can afford to pay. Hence, for a long time few cinemas could be built in prime locations.

This makes a difference because cinema works best when it becomes the magic of a night at the movies. People want more than just the film. They want the full panoply of the theatre experience and, when the cinema is a cheap out of the way affair, they mostly choose to wait for the video instead.

But our fire regulations have now been changed to conform to the standard adopted in most other places. Other exits may lead into the passageways to the street from cinema fire exits. Cinemas can now be built on higher floors, which means they have become commercially viable again in prime locations. The night at the movies is back.

And because it is cinemas where the film business makes most of its money, particularly in Asia with the prevalence of copyright piracy in videos, this one small change in the fire regulations is the biggest boost our film industry has had in many years.

It is getting others. The introduction of digital projectors has led to much quicker transitions of films from the studio to the screen. This again has made life more difficult for the pirates.

The fact of the matter is that local film business is already starting to revive without government help. Its nadir was six years ago. Government as usual is six years behind the time.

So here is my suggestion for what the film council should do with its HK$300 million. Use HK$2 million of it, perhaps, to help pay for the cost of holding the Hong Kong film awards and return the HK$298 million balance to the public purse.



Monitor