Macao Film Panorama kicks off with ‘non-local’ theme night

A scene from ‘Illegalist’

This year’s Macao Film Panorama was inaugurated on Friday night at Cinematheque Passion with the screening of four shorts and a question and answer session with their respective directors.

As an introduction to the approximately two dozen films showing at this year’s Panorama, the opening gala shorts were connected by a common theme of non-local workers, be they migrant or illegal workers.

Of the four shorts, just one was set in Macau.

In ‘Illegalist’, local documentary filmmaker Penny Lam departs from his usual genre to create a compelling 26-minute drama about two mainlanders who come to Macau to work illegally, one as a sex worker and the other at a construction site.

The two workers plan to stay in Macau just long enough to earn some money for their families and to pay their visa overstay fine when they return to the mainland. But a complication arises when the Macau government announces a sudden increase in the fine, and the two workers are left short of funds.

“As a local, I have always known that there are illegal workers in Macau casinos, however, most of them have never been captured by the police. This is a very weird phenomenon, and so I found it interesting [to depict],” explained Lam at the opening gala.

“I wanted to write a movie about earning money,” he added. “The two workers are contributing to society, but they have never been a part of that society. They are never being included in that society. These illegal workers only earn 200 patacas per day, which is nothing to local people.”

‘Illegalist’ was awarded Best Short Feature Film in the Local View Power project of the 2nd International Film Festival & Awards – Macao.

Set in rural Malaysia during the 1990s, ‘Bringing in the Wine’, tells the story of Paigu and his teenage friends, who spend their days drinking, smoking, gambling and street fighting.

A scene from ‘Hato’s Journey’

One day, Paigu moves to the big city to pursue romance, but instead finds droves of mindless workers that all look and act the same. Somewhere along the way, Paigu loses sight of his motivation in moving to the city and becomes such a worker himself.

Meanwhile, ‘Tea Land’ by Taiwanese director Tseng Ying-ting depicts a dark and unsettling account of five runaway migrant workers from Thailand and Vietnam who work on a quiet mountain tea farm in Taiwan.

One of the workers saves enough money to return to his home in Thailand, but dies unexpectedly the night before. The fraternal relationship between the migrant workers dissipates when accusations start flying over who took the dead man’s savings.

‘Losing Sight of a Longed Place’ was the fourth opening gala short. Initially a student project, the animation is a film adaptation of an interview with a young, homosexual man living in Hong Kong, who tries to resolve his parents’ disapproval over his lifestyle.

The Macao Film Panorama aims to provide a platform for displaying local films and enabling Macau filmmakers and audiences to appreciate a greater number of local productions.

It is divided into several sections, including a “Local Indies Force” constituting 10 films narrowed down from a total of 24 submissions and “Local View Power Revisited”, in which 14 films that were initially commissioned by the Macau Cultural Centre for the 2016/17 Local View Power are now to be shown on the silver screen again.

Several other local films will be screened, including a short entitled ‘Hato’s Journey’, which tells the story of man traveling to Macau on the day of last year’s Typhoon Hato, and ‘San Va Hotel – Behind the Scenes’ depicting the act of movie making set in Macau’s historical gambling and entertainment precinct, Rua da Felicidade.

There is also the presentation of four feature-length films: Ka Keong Chan’s ‘Passing Rain’, Fei Ho’s ‘Love is Cold’, Ivo Ferreira’s ‘Letters from War’ and Tracy Choi’s ‘Sisterhood’.

The Macao Film Panorama runs until May 31 and tickets may be purchased from the Cinematheque Passion box office.