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Macau Meets Cannes

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Arguably one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, the invitation-only 68th Cannes Film Festival took place from May 13 to 24 this year, at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, with the usual host of stars and industry big names present to preview new films of all genres, including documentaries from around the world.
 
This year Macau was represented by a 31-minute short film entitled, A Useless Fiction, by Cheong Kin Man, which was screened in the The Short Film Corner section of the festival. The film’s presence at the Festival was partially sponsored by the Institute of European Studies of Macau, Creative Macau and Macao Foundation. 
 
A multi-layered tapestry of fictional and true stories, Cheong wrote, directed and edited the experimental documentary and ethnographic film, which draws on scenes from his daily life and the process of filmmaking, raising several anthropological and existential questions on nature, origin, language, non-existence, identity, visual media and dominant cultures. 
 
The film interplays between text, sound and image and includes a song interpreted by Hsu Shi-tien from the United States and texts in Korean rewritten by Dabin Park from South Korea.
Cheong completed his MA in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin with a scholarship from Tertiary Education Services Office between 2012-2014, and notes that Visual Anthropology informed a lot of the ideas behind A Useless Fiction. 
 
“It was the visual anthropology that I understood and people from the MA programme who encouraged me to challenge some conventional or taken-for-granted ideas. Even for myself it is a bit hard to explain my film in a concise way. I think I was a bit too greedy to put everything in the film, so maybe because of this, the film is multilayered in nature, both in its stories and its visual and aural expressions,” explains Cheong. 
 
“Altogether there were six topics I wanted to talk about with this film: the reflexive process of the making of the film itself; returning to one’s own culture and way of thinking; similarities vs. differences among cultures; translation-languages-interpretation; non-filmed and the reflection on making Ou Mun Ian, Macaenses (a 2009 documentary),” the film maker adds.
 
“Actually I see my film as traditional Chinese artwork: every detail or motive has its own meaning, for example, how the subtitles and languages are presented, the relationship between image and sound, and so on. One example of visual expression: the idea of making images only with a smartphone and juxtaposing them was inspired by Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl’s essay In Defense of the Poor Image and the Chinese proverb ‘to compensate for lack of ability through hard work.’”
 
Nadine Wanono, a French visual anthropologist, former student and friend of late French director, Jean Rouch, one of the founders of visual anthropology and great master of direct cinema, is another person impressed by Cheong’s film:
 
“A mise-en-abyme of the viewer who is also the director: through what A-Man sees, you surprise yourself by finding out your own humanity while discovering another one from the others. On account of the poetry and the troubling rhythm, this film is a fascinating work of research,” she says.
 
In the coming months A Useless Fiction will be presented at a number of film festivals including the Kino Otok – Isola Cinema International Film Festival in Slovenia, the Cinemística Film Festival in Granada, the Festival of Migrant Film in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Columbia Gorge International Film Festival (USA). There is no shortage of accolades either; the short recently won the “2015 Rising Star Award” at the Canada International Film Festival (Vancouver).
 
 
Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan surprise winner of Palme d’Or
 
 
Jacques Audiard cemented his place as the premier contemporary French director by winning the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his seventh feature, Dheepan, thanking his father, the prolific screenwriter Michel Audiard, who died in 1985, in his speech. Audiard, 63, took the Grand Prix (or runner-up award) five years ago for A Prophet, and competed at the festival three years ago with Rust & Bone. His new film is a less-starry affair; the tale of a former Tamil Tiger fighter in the Sri Lankan civil war who links up with two strangers to pretend to be a family and find a life of asylum in a tough, drug-infested housing estate on the edge of Paris. Dheepan, a mostly Tamil-language film, is a deeply moving portrayal of Tamil refugees’ tentative attempts to create the intimacy of a family in a volatile environment. It is powered by performances from the Sri Lankan duo of Antonythasan Jesuthasan and Kalieaswari Srinivasanbutis. 
 
 
Asian Films shine in Cannes 
 
 
The 2015 festival showcased some 53 films in the official selection, including competition and out of competition screenings. Nineteen films from around the world made it to the Palme d’Or selection phase, the highest accolade in the competition. In this select cinematic group, three notable Asian films made the cut: The Assassin (Nie Yanniang – Taiwan); Shan He Gu Ren (Mountains May Depart – China); and Umimachi Diary (Japan). 
 
The Assassin, directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, is the filmmaker’s first feature film in eight years and saw him walk away with the Best Director award at this year’s festival. Shu Qi stars as the young female assassin who’s tasked with eliminating fraudulent government authorities during the Tang dynasty. That is until she fails at a task and is ordered to kill the man she loves or break the righteous assassin code. 
 
Jia Zhangke’s Shan He Gu Ren (Mountains May Depart) is a three-part saga that shows a couple and their son’s lives from the 1990s to the year 2025. From China to Australia, the lives, loves, hopes and delusions of three individuals in a society changing at breakneck speed. 
 
Umimachi Diary tells the story of three sisters who travel the countryside for their father’s funeral and are reunited with their other shy sister, setting off a touching bonding journey. Adapted from the popular manga of the same name by Akimi Yoshida, Cannes-winning director, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Umimachi Diary is his rendition of the story.
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