‘The Script Road’ enters its fifth edition with a longer festival

Ricardo Pinto (left) and Helder Beja

The Macau literary festival “The Script Road” celebrates its fifth anniversary this year. The festival runs from March 5 to 19 and will offer more activities for a longer period, the organization said yesterday in a press conference at the IACM Building Library.
As the organizers explained, the “big difference” of extending the festival for three days is that it allows the events to span three weekends, when more people are available to attend events.
“It will be a longer, bigger and hopefully better edition,” said co-organizer Hélder Beja, who highlighted the presence of an “important” and “interesting” guest, referring to politician and historian José Pacheco Pereira, from Portugal.
The 2016 edition celebrates two major authors, Camilo Pessanha (a Portuguese who resided in Macau for a long period) and Chinese Tang Xianzu. The festival aims to be “more international” by featuring authors from a wide range of countries, and has emphasized a special highlight in the form of a couple of poets from the Phillipines, a country that one of the organizers, Helder Beja, described as “very important due its big community and high representation in the territory.”
Although the event will adopt the same model as last year, one of the novelties of this year’s event is the fact that all concerts will be held in the Macau Cultural Center’s (CCM) Grand Auditorium which, in the words of Ricardo Pinto, is a “more appropriate venue for the concerts and for the ambience we wanted.”
This is a change from previous editions of the festival, where most of the concerts were held at the Venetian Arena in Cotai.
Another organizer Yao Jingming mentioned the importance of this festival, saying that, in his opinion, it has become a “name card of Macau and something we use to face the world.” Yao also high- lighted the festival’s local component, which will feature two great authors who each have an intimate relationship with Macau.
Also on the local side, the presence of guests such as Mu Xinxin, Carlos Morais José, Un Sio San and Carlos André, among others, ensures that Macau will be well represented.
This local representation extends to the visual arts and to cinema, with local filmmakers Tracy Choi, Emily Chan and Cheong Kin Man joining the festival to screen some of their latest creations.
Two of the most acclaimed public speakers in previous editions, Portuguese Rui Zink and Taiwan’s Lolita Hu, will return to Macau this year, together with debut guests such as Ernesto Dabo from Guinea-Bissau.
What remains unchanged is the MOP2.3 million festival budget, MOP1.4 million of which was granted through public financing.
The final version of the program will be made known about one month before the festival.