Int’l Documentary Film Festival | Second edition pays homage to Kawase

Cinematheque Passion

Embodying the theme of “Time and Growth”, the Macau International Documentary Film Festival will return for its second edition this month, once again inviting local documentary filmmaker Penny Lam to curate the festival.

Some 26 documentaries, subtitled in both Chinese and English, will be screened over the course of the three-week festival held at Cinematheque Passion.

In accordance with the festival’s theme, the documentaries have been partitioned according to the four seasons, with spring, summer, autumn and winter reflecting the chronological stages of a person’s life.

“In Chinese [culture], we see the seasons as the four stages of life, with spring being the beginning – or childhood,” explained the returning curator in an interview with the Times.

Taking center stage at this year’s festival is “director in focus” Naomi Kawase, an award-winning Japanese filmmaker known for her documentary-realism. Much of Kawase’s work is semi-autobiographical and the filmmaker has a discernible fondness for using herself, her family and her friends as film subjects.

“The oldest [Kawase] film [we are screening] is from 1992 and the latest one is from 2015 and so the filmmaker has obviously changed a lot over that time,” said Lam.

“In the later films, which come from different stages in her career, you can see how she changes as a person – first as a teenager and then as a mother.”

By casting herself as a principal subject in her work, Kawase’s films chronicle her personal growth as both an individual and a filmmaker, making the organizers’ choice of ‘director in focus’ well suited to the festival’s theme.

“Critics said that her films are like a personal diary that she has [transformed] into a film,” said Lam, adopting a popular interpretation of Kawase’s artistic style. “Documentaries, for a long time, have had the reputation of being [impersonal] with their responsibility to reflect society. But Kawase doesn’t care, [she] believes she can film whatever she wants.”

In one of her seven documentaries being screened at the festival, Kawase records the process of tracking down her father, who abandoned her when she was a child. In another, she gives birth to her son on camera.

As is becoming a tradition with the young festival, this edition will also feature a Macau entry. Wong Kuan Chak’s The Last Ride (2017), a 15-minute short to be screened alongside several other documentary shorts, takes a humorous look at the city’s scooter racing sub-culture.

The Last Ride is about a young man who wants to quit scooter racing to pursue a different passion. He decides to organize one last race before he gives up the sport for good.

“In Macau, the teenagers used to race their scooters,” said Lam. “This was never something serious, but there is a sub-culture here and some people [within this sub-culture] take the racing very seriously.”

According to Lam, scooter racing is a decades-old tradition for the Macau youth. Even today, he said, there are some people still racing in Coloane in the early hours of the morning.

This year’s festival is larger in terms of the selection of films on offer: 26 compared to 18 in its inaugural edition. It has also been moved from spring last year to the summer, with the intention of drawing more tourists and students to the screenings.

Organizers say that although new film festivals are the trend in the city’s cultural scene, perhaps only two can be strictly defined as “festivals about documentaries.”

“The Macau public generally prefer works of fiction [to documentaries] because they are more accessible and more [prevalent] in the commercial scene,” Rita Wong, the chief operating officer of Cinematheque Passion, offered as an explanation.

“I think that this is starting to change with the documentary festivals [in the city],” she continued. “People need to be introduced to documentaries through these kinds of festivals, because the public are not familiar with [this media form] and may not know where to start with them.”

“A lot of the films that we selected for the festival are very cinematic […] because of the reality of the Macau audience,” said Lam. “Not all documentaries are cinematic – and [this] is not a way of judging the merit of documentaries,” he continued, adding that “the magic and power of documentaries comes over time.”

The Macau International Documentary Film Festival begins on July 8 with screenings lasting until July 30. Focus filmmaker Naomi Kawase will arrive in the city for the festival’s concluding week, starting from July 23.

Organizers’ pick

Penny Lam (left) and Rita Wong

Penny Lam highlights Still Tomorrow (2017), a film by mainland Chinese director Fan Jian, as one not to miss at the Macau International Documentary Film Festival.

The documentary recounts the surreal – yet true – story of a woman’s journey from being a farmer, married against her will to an older man, to a celebrated poet who earned the attention of several prominent Chinese writers. With her newfound fame and money, the woman is able to secure her freedom from her husband and start a new life.

“It is a very poetic and surreal story,” said Lam. “This story is amazing and the cinematography is impressive.”

The film won a prestigious award at its premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, becoming one of the first Chinese films to be recognized at such a high level within the international documentary-making community.

“We nearly didn’t get the chance to screen it here because the film is so new and it had not been premiered in Asia yet,” said Lam. “All of a sudden, Shanghai Film Festival agreed to premiere it earlier this month, and so we were granted permission [by the filmmaker] to screen it in July.”

Still Tomorrow (2017), Fan Jian. Mandarin-language film with subtitles provided in Chinese and English. Screenings: July 16 at 9:30 p.m. and July 30 at 4:30 p.m.

RITA WONG says she is very excited for one of Kawase’s earliest documentary films to be brought to the Passion Cinematheque screen.

Forty minutes in length, Embracing (1992) is about the Japanese director’s search for her father who abandoned their family when she was a child.

Adhering to her documentary-realism style, the film avoids Hollywood clichés associated with fictional stories of sentimental family reunions. It even goes as far as denying the audience any more than a passing insight into the eventual meeting of father and daughter.

Now a famous director, Kawase launched her career with this documentary, which propelled her to fame within Japan.

“My choice is one of Kawase’s earliest documentaries, because it is very hard to find [this film] in cinemas,” said Wong. “It is a precious thing to watch Kawase’s early films in the cinema because she is getting very famous and it is [usually] only possible to find her later works.”

Embracing (1992), Naomi Kawase. Japanese-language with subtitles provided in Chinese and English. Screenings: July 13 at 7 p.m. and July 23 at 8:30 p.m. followed by a “meet the director” session.