SON OF THE BAR I was born in Hong Kong but at a very early age I went to England because my father [Arthur Garcia] was called to the bar there. He ended up as a Supreme Court judge in Hong Kong and he was also Hong Kong's first ombudsman. So I grew up mostly in London, in Kensington, and also in Hong Kong, where I went to the ESF's Quarry Bay School and King George V School, before I went to Ratcliffe College in Leicestershire. People often ask me what it was like in boarding school. I think you learn individual self-reliance. You learn a lot but you also learn how to learn. I was interested in literature and art and I learned how to row and ski.
In the sixth form I got to run the film society and I would order the films I wanted to see. At that time - we are talking about the 60s - Jean-Luc Godard was big news. His were not the sort of films you would see in your local Odeon, so I showed some of those, and Lindsay Anderson's If ..., which was about revolution in a boarding school - very popular! I also got some films from Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker, whom I later got to come to Hong Kong. That is the thing I love about film, you watch the work of artists and then, when you meet them, it can be like meeting an old relative. Or it can be a different experience entirely.
A WIDENING SCOPE I went to university in Leeds because it was one of the few places you could study art and cinema. By then, I was very interested in cinema and I became involved in the film society, editing a film magazine called Scope. That was my first real engagement in writing about movies. I was 18 or 19 years old and I went out interviewing filmmakers. The first one I ever interviewed was Tony Garnett, who was producing films by Ken Loach and a film called British Sounds by Godard. So I had actually met someone who had produced a film by Godard. To me - at that age - that was amazing.
MEETING OF MINDS The idea of cinema is very strong for people who want to combine visual arts, literature - and who want to meet girls. Later in my life, I was lucky enough to meet and become good friends with the French critic Serge Daney, and he would say that cinema is always about 'the meeting'. I meet you, you meet me, we meet the film. Many of the people I have met in my life have been because of cinema, because not only is going to the cinema a collective activity, but loving it is, too. That's why film festivals are so important - they keep the idea of collective viewing and enthusiasm alive. That's important nowadays, with the digitalisation of media - watching films on TV, iPhone, iPad - which is a good thing, because people watch more films, but it is a solitary experience.
HK IS OK When I moved back to Hong Kong after graduating, in the late 1970s, I worked in the Urban Services Department and they had just started the Chinese Orchestra, the Repertory Theatre and the film festival. Because of my background I was put to work on the cultural side of things, especially the film festival, and that's when I began to learn about Hong Kong cinema. I had been brought up on classic and Hollywood cinema, I'd studied film language. Watching a lot of old and new Hong Kong movies really opened my eyes - there was a commonality of film language and it showed that Hong Kong cinema from the 1950s, for example, was a match for anything going on in the world.
I helped the film festival start publishing much-needed books on Hong Kong movies. These were bilingual publications largely written by Hong Kong critics and they helped spread the interest around the world. These books showed that Hong Kong movies were worth taking seriously and became one of the first steps towards recognising our film heritage. I think that has been one of the major legacies of the festival; through its many retrospectives of Hong Kong movies, it helped lead to the building of the film archive and the preservation of Hong Kong films.