Movie Glamour

The inaugural International Film Festival & Awards Macao (IFFAM) brought a host of industry talent to the city last month

 

 

Jointly organised by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) and the Macau Films & Television Productions and Culture Association (MFTPA), the inaugural International Film Festival & Awards Macao (IFFAM) took place from December 8 to 13 last year, bringing with it internationally-renowned film directors and industry names. 

 

The aim of the festival was to raise awareness and promote the various aspects of Chinese-language, East Asian and international cinema in all its forms: as entertainment and as an industry, as art and as a tool of dialogue, in a spirit of freedom and exchange. 

 

Industry names from around the region and further afield were in attendence including Festival Ambassador and director Clemens Klopfenstein, Edinburgh International Film Festival Director Mark Adams, and Busan International Film Festival Director Kang Soo-youn.

 

Also visiting Macau for the festival was American film director, screenwriter, and actor Tom McCarthy.  McCarthy has appeared in several films, including Meet the Parents and Good Night, and Good Luck, and television series such as The Wire, Boston Public, and Law & Order. McCarthy received critical acclaim for his writing/direction work for the independent films The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007), Win Win (2011), and Spotlight (2015), the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, won McCarthy the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.

 

Another award-winning director invited to attend IFFAM was Portuguese film director Marco Martins, best known for his 2005 film Alice, which premiered at Cannes and won the Best Picture Award at the Directors' Fortnight. He is also the director of How to Draw a Perfect Circle (2009) and Saint Jorge (2016), the latter winning him the Best Director Award at IFFAM, as well as earning actor Nuno Lopes the award for Best Actor for his portrayal of an unemployed boxer.

 

 

By  Marco carvalho /  Translation João Pedro Lau

 

It’s a great question… There are so many! But, I don’t know if there can be enough, right? What this is all about is, hopefully, bringing people of different cultures and countries together to talk about something we all love, which is films. Every region has their own sort of things to offer. I find it exciting when you have a town, like Macau right now, which is known as the gaming capital of the world, introducing something with the cultural value of a film festival. It’s great. And to be able to come here, to this part of the world, and share movies and talk about movies.

 

I think every movie you make, you set out to make the best movie you can and I think with that movie there was just a very high bar in terms of how to tell it and therefore a certain responsibility to get it right. Spending two years researching it and talking, not only to the reporters and all the people involved, but to the victims of abuse … spending all that time we would just feel “We want to get this one right for them. We want to tell it in a way that will connect with people”.  I was talking with some people here at the festival about the film and they were saying how emotional they found it, which to me is really interesting because, obviously it’s an emotional subject and emotional matter, a painful one. But ultimately we tried to approach it as much as possible like the reporters did, which is somewhat fair. We tried to not weigh it too much. We tried to let the facts and the information speak for themselves and I think somehow that allowed audiences to connect with a material that maybe was not always so accessible. Part of the reason that crimes persisted for so long is, who wants to talk about sexual abuse of children? Who wants to talk of sexual abuse anyway? It a horrible thing. It’s a horrible thing to talk about … But the silence, the not having the conversations, allowed this to exist. I think that, as storytellers, we were trying to approach it such a way.

 

Nothing would make me happier. You are right, Stephen and Deborah are friends and I was thrilled to come here. They are really excited about it: about the Festival, of course, about The 13, The 13 Enterprise. It was great to do a tour of the hotel, which is really incredible and really exciting. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be around people like that. People who are highly creative and highly motivated. Stephen is an incredibly creative guy but he understands that any sort of business needs to be done very well and people like that are just interesting to spend time with. 

 

 

By  Hélder beja & wendi song / Translation wendi song

 

When we make films, we don’t think about awards, you think about the public and who you are addressing the film to. But actually awards can be important, to make your film more visible to a bigger audience, to have media attention. In a film like this, such a political film, media attention is good both ways, because it talks about the film and it talks about the subject of the film, which is really important.

 

When I started writing Saint George, people kept telling me that there’s nothing more dangerous than to write a film about the present, because we don't have perspective, things will seem different in a few years and when you look back you have a different perspective on it.  I tend to agree with this, but then for us it was a very decisive moment in our recent history. We lost a lot of social privileges, a lot of people were losing their jobs and everything was changing. I think that news and newspapers and TV tend to talk more about politics and numbers, but they don't see the real faces of the people, the real faces of the crisis. So I took the risk. I never made a social film before; all my films are very different from this one. For our generation, this was something different. It seemed that we had to pay our debt to Europe and everybody was accepting that.

 

I think it’s very unique what he achieved in the film. Nuno is a very emotional actor, a very profound actor, and here he has this tough personality, he’s a boxer who is struggling. You see this big body but with a big heart as well. People are very touched by the character.

 

My films are always about something that I know very well or that I want to know more about. I tend to choose subjects that are very close to me, that’s why I usually shoot my fictions in Portugal. As far as documentaries, I’ve shot a lot of them abroad, in Japan, in India, in Brazil. And I will shoot in Macau for sure. For us Portuguese, Macau has a bit of a fascination, it’s a bit of history lost in time that you recover, that you don’t know exactly what to do with. It’s really amazing, when you have a fascination for something; it’s great to make a film about it.