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"It reminds me a lot of Hollywood, before the great split between commerce and art," said programmer David Overbey of his Eastern Horizons retrospective, part of the Toronto Festival of Festivals this September. The Asian-cinema specialist had spent five months shuttling between Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam to put together an introduction to the latest decade of a cinema most of us have thought of, if at all, as Kung-Fu schlock.
If the Asian Pacific cinemas outside mainland China and Japan have gone largely unheralded in the West-with occasional, and often political exceptions, at festivals-it's not because they're not important at home. Hong Kong studios churn out hundreds of films a year, dominating screens throughout the region, while the Taiwanese film industry is struggling, with government help, to regain its footing. The Filipino industry makes 150 films a year, with a locally produced star vehicle easily outgrossing any foreign film; South Korea produces 80 films a year, mostly for the domestic market. (Vietnam was represented in this retrospective with only one film, Karma, with promises of a fuller program for the future.)
But in an exhibitor-driven market feeding a public voracious for escapism, most films are cranked out on deadlines that would blow a U.S. TV producer's mind, on models that producers design with a strict reverence for high concept. As Filipino director Lino Brocka says, "One producer I work for approaches me with a project and says, 'But please, Lino-no awards. I can't eat those awards."
Yet filmmakers now appear eager to reach star-struck, glamour-happy mass audiences with films that transcend lowest-common-denominator expectations. Out of Hong Kong, a generation mostly trained in the West is producing work with a punky energy and social bite. Young Taiwanese directors have created a subgenre of personal, sometimes touching, and sometimes brooding films of daily life that evoke parallels with directors as diverse as Satyajit Ray and Antonioni. In the Philippines, veteran directors are hoping that an influx of commercial work will fund long-dreamed-of personal projects. And Korean directors, standing on a redolently sentimental tradition, are producing dramas of international stature.
Over Hong Kong hovers a shadow called 1997-the date when the British colony is slated to become part of Mainland China. But for...