Dramas of reel life

THE way Allen Fong tells the story, his childhood sounds like the Hong Kong version of Cinema Paradiso. When he was nine years old, growing up in a traditional family in Shau Kei Wan, Fong used to play truant from school to watch movies - any movies - in the local cinemas. Years later, in the late 1970s, his bitter-sweet film dramas on RTHK made him a household name - still remembered with admiration by many in their 20s and older who grew up with his images of people struggling to get by in Hong Kong. 'It only cost 20 cents to see a film,' remembered Fong of his earliest days in the movie world. 'And at the time if you could squeeze two people on to a seat then you only had to pay half-price, so I used to force my younger brother to run away from school and give up his breakfast money to come to see films with me. 'We used to watch everything: Charlie Chaplin, Wild West movies, Robin Hood. If I skipped school then I could watch four movies a day.' When he wasn't in the cinema, his favourite pastime was going to the Chinese opera with his mother. 'Secretly, I love to cry and those tear-jerkers were a good opportunity,' he said. Later, at 12, he amused himself by drawing animated pictures on narrow rolls of clear plastic, and putting on a film show with a cardboard box, a simple winding mechanism and an electric torch. 'My father thought I was quite mad,' he said. His family was very traditional, Fong said. 'You know, a typical Hakka family: the boys went to school, and the girls worked. 'Except I didn't do much of either,' he reflected. As a teenager he found friends in the television business, and by borrowing a Super-8 camera, and using five or 10-metre lengths of spliced, unexposed film purloined from TVB, he pieced together 40-second segments - images, or experimental sequences using razor blade cuts on the film. His parents reacted negatively when he told them he wanted to be a film maker. His father, a poorly paid clerk at GEC, wanted his bright elder son to be a doctor or a lawyer, and was hurt when Fong's own plans proved to be at odds with his. 'We had a very bad relationship for years, and it didn't really improve until I went to study for my masters in the United States. 'First we talked at Christmas and Chinese New Year by telephone, and then we started writing to each other. Five years later, when I returned from America, we were friends again,' said Fong, who based his 1982 movie Father and Son on his own experiences. His time at the University of Southern California showed him that his chosen career was going to be tough. Not only was he holding down a night job in a Chinese restaurant to pay his fees, but he was also having to fight his fellow students for equipment. 'I cursed my teachers at the time, because there were not enough cameras, not enough film to go round, and we always had to argue with each other about who was going to get the chance to show what they could do. 'But later I was grateful, because they were preparing us for the real world, where it's much worse and you have to be really nasty and really political [to be successful].' It is partly the memory of those early struggles that inspired Fong to plan his latest project - a drama about young film makers in China. Invited by the University of Hong Kong to be their first artist in residence (individual departments have had individual artists, but none have been invited by the university as a whole) for the next semester, Fong wanted a project that could involve anyone and everyone. 'I want to show the graduate students how to use a camera and then send them to China to talk to young film makers. 'I hope that they will come up with some very good material for a drama on what those film makers are going through right now. I hope they will learn something about China, and also about communicating a message through moving images. 'Video techniques are something that is relevant to everyone - this won't be just for students of arts subjects. Doctors, engineers, musicians will all find some use for video,' he said. His early style, of fly-on-the-wall real-life drama, as first seen in the films he made for the late 1970s RTHK series Beneath Lion Rock has hardly changed, he said. The 'Wild Child' of the award-winning film of same name - a little boy who made his pocket money from the mourners at his local cemetery, but who did not understand what death really meant until his grandmother was buried - is in part based on Fong himself, 'but there are children like that in Hong Kong still'. There are no more fishing families living on beached sampans, stranded between the land and the sea, as shown in the film Song of Yuen Chan Chai which won an outstanding film award at the 1977 London Film Festival. Those people have moved on, materially, from the time all they thought they wanted was an electric fan and the chance to have a flat, Fong said. 'But those kinds of social problems are still here in Hong Kong, they have just transferred to the temporary housing areas instead.' Today, Fong has few of the material trappings that his early success had seemed to promise. His contemporaries among the 'New Wave' film makers like Tsui Hark, have gone on to make bigger and popular films, and live expensive lifestyles. In contrast, Fong is still living and working in a small, sparse apartment-studio in Wan Chai, making a few films and videos and a lot of plans. 'This film maker only ever wanted to make films, not money,' he said. From many people this kind of statement would ring hollow but Fong, who looks much younger than his 47 years and has a tremendous and infectious vitality, was extremely convincing. 'Some people say I look and dress like a peasant, but I'm very happy being what I am, and doing what I do,' he said. 'After I left RTHK I was offered a lot of money - a million dollars, which was worth much more in 1980 - to do some nasty films, but I didn't want it. 'There is a big difference between films about sex and pornographic films. I would like to do films about sex, which can be joyful, but not about pornography, which is like prostitution. 'I like to make films which make people think, and which show things the way they are.