Culture – Cinematheque Passion | Macau film season to kick off on Saturday

The recently reopened Cinematheque Passion will host a themed program this month titled “Panorama: Macau Films”, which will showcase a selection of around 25 films shot in Macau or directed by local filmmakers.

The festival will run from April 14 (Saturday) until April 28 at Cinematheque Passion. In addition to film screenings, audiences will be able to attend post-screening talks and seminars to interact with the filmmakers.

Among those to be screened during the Panorama festival are the Macau entries for the International Film Festival and Awards – Macau (IFFAM) festival, namely Emily Chan’s “Our Seventeen” and Tracy Choi’s award-winning “Sisterhood”. At the IFFAM festival, “Sisterhood” actress Jennifer Yu won the “best newcomer” award, while the film earned the audience prize.

The two films will each be screened twice throughout the program, once at the start of Panorama on April 14, and again on April 27 and 28.

Other films from the 1990s, which depict the final days of pre-handover Macau, will also be shown at various dates during Panorama.

These include Chu Iao Ian’s “Ah Ming’s Macao” – a critically-acclaimed film regarded as “the first Macau people’s film under the Portuguese Administration” – that interviews locals about their feelings regarding the then-
approaching 1999 handover to China. The 31-minute short will be screened on April 15.

Also playing this month is “The Bicycle Man, Macau Diary” by Ivo Ferreira and António Pedro (showing on April 15), which also explores the late pre-handover era.

Then there is “The Bewitching Braid”, a movie by Chinese directors Cai Yuan-yuan and Cai An-an, brothers from Sichuan Province. The plot is based on a novel by well-known Macanese writer Henrique de Senna Fernandes, who is regarded as one of the most prominent writers from the pre-handover period.

“I Repeated” by local documentary filmmaker Penny Lam will be screened on April 23. The documentary investigates Macau’s unusually high rate of students repeating school years due to missed grades, and explores the link between these students and the lure of comfortable casino jobs.

Another documentary, Wallace Chan’s “Fonting the City”, follows a group of designers searching Macau for the “forgotten typefaces” that decorate buildings in the San Ma Lou area. They search for and reveal these fonts, hoping to draw people’s attention to the often-ignored aesthetics in urban typefaces, and the sheer variety of fonts present in the city. It will be shown on April 23 at the cinema house.

According to organizers, the program celebrates the evolution of local filmmaking in Macau which, since the handover, has been accelerated by government initiatives.

“Before Macau’s handover in 1999, a group of Macau people passionate about films together with overseas graduates coming back to the city zealously made their own independent films without considering […] the market,” reads a statement published in the program’s brochure.

“This was the beginning of Macau films.”

The brochure adds that many young and talented filmmakers have been “successfully cultivated” over the past two decades, partly due to government support for the local industry.

Cinematheque Passion launched the inauguration ceremony for the revamped cinema house on March 30. The facility, which is owned and financed by the Cultural Affairs Bureau, is operated by CUT Ltd.

Parties interested in Panorama: Macau Films can visit Cinematheque Passion for more information.