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The 2003 Sydney Film Festival was one of the most consistently enjoyable - albeit unspectacular - festivals in director Gayle Lake's reign. However the under-representation of Asian films in her programming, and the lack of quality on display, is a sad testimony as to why Sydney needs Paul De Carvalho's and Juanita Kwok's Sydney Asian Pacific Film Festival, when Melbourne and Brisbane seem to be able to survive without a similar entity. Whether this is the result of poor programming (I counted 9 films that Gayle lake probably saw at Pusan) or whether the director's of the Melbourne and Brisbane festivals have
outmanoeuvred her when it comes to inviting films, it is difficult to say.
I must confess I didn't see make it to everything, but three of the festival's undeniable stand outs did come from the Asian region. One of them,
Together, came second in the audience's overall choice, as if in rebuke to the long-held belief (consolidated during the reign of Paul Byrnes) that the Sydney fest audience are unwilling to embrace Asian films.
Already picked out for general release by the eagle-eye of Hopscotch distributor Troy Lum,
Together marked a return to form (and to English) by fifth generation film-maker Chen Kaige.
A movie as vibrant, touching and precise as Vivaldi's four seasons,
Together told the story of a peasant violin prodigy and the unanticipated consequences when his father escorts him to Beijing in search of an appropriate violin teacher and a scholarship. There is no scholarship - corruption is rife - but the right teacher is found in the form of a scruffy deadbeat with lots of cats, grungy socks under his bed alongside a photo of a lost love. Meanwhile the boy has his heart captured by a flirtatious goodtime girl who requests the boy play for a rich boyfriend's birthday. The film hits all the right marks and while the cast is good (including Chen himself who has a supporting role), the boy who plays (and actually plays violin) Xioachun is spectacular. The finale is a tear-stricken affair which should generate enough positive word of mouth to pack them in when
Together gets a general release.
Another stand out Chinese film at the Sydney fest, criminally neglected by the audience was
Blind Shaft. At time of writing Blind Shaft has not been picked up for release yet, despite the string of prizes it has picked up at international festivals including a Silver Bear at Berlin. An engaging study of human greed which stops short of being a thriller,
Blind Shaft tells the story of two unscrupulous peasants who run a scam finding jobs for unemployed workers. Palming off the workers relatives, the scammers kill them and then trap the remains in mine cave-ins they have triggered. The cave-ins act both as a cover for their deed and more importantly, as a means to blackmail the mine bosses about unsafe work practices and conditions. According to the director who was present at the Q & A (a surprising
amount of which was conducted in mandarin which marks some kind of milestone for the Sydney
fest), this type of scam is not unheard of in China. However, whether fiction or fact,
Blind Shaft had a sense of authenticity, that never strained even despite plot developments which on paper might seem unlikely.
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