Hou garners accolades for upcoming film

Hou Hsiao-hsien at the Pusan International Film Festival. PHOTO COURTESY OF PUSAN FILM FESTIVIAL

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) received the Pusan Award for his newest project The Best of Our Times on Wednesday at the Paradise Beach Hotel in Busan. The award, a US$20,000 grant, was the top prize bestowed by the Pusan Promotional Plan, a three-day forum held in the conjunction with the Pusan (Busan) International Film Festival where filmmakers met with movie producers and financiers to promote and find funding for their upcoming projects.

Now in its fifth year, the forum has fast become one of the annual Korean film festival's main attractions. Its success is one of the reasons why the relatively new Busan film festival has managed so quickly to surpass older events such as Taiwan's Golden Horse and position itself at the center of the movie industry in Asia.

The forum, held this year from Nov. 18 to Nov. 20, is a market for films that are in the early stages of development. This year, 21 films in-the-making were selected to participate in the forum, including Hou's. The forum then arranged 500 meetings for filmmakers to speak with investors, film executives and top film producers from around the world and promote their new projects. This year, according to the forum's organizers, 1,000 professionals from 35 countries and 300 film-industry companies attended the forum.

The seventh and final day of the festival in Busan began with the forum's awards ceremony and ended with a wild beach party at the Paradise Hotel, located on a hillside facing Haeundae Beach, where young Korean film professionals danced to hip-pop and "K-pop" tunes while industry bigwigs from Cannes and Berlin hobnobbed in the lounge upstairs.

Hou, of course, was delighted to have won the award, after which he was treated to a banquet by overseas Taiwanese living in Korea. With quite a few drinks in him, Hou began belting out karaoke numbers with other Taiwanese filmmakers at the dinner table. Later, to top it off, the whole group later went to a karaoke parlor for more drinking and crooning. All this Korean-style hospitality was too much for the contingent of Taiwanese filmmakers, who became so drunk that none of them could make it to the party at Haeundae.

Hou had definite cause for celebration. His new film project, The Best of Our Times, got the most attention at the forum from day one. Huang Wen-ying (黃文英), Hou's representative for this project, said she attended dozens of meetings during the forum's three days. "I only stop to eat lunch," Huang said.

The Best of Our Times is an anthology of four short movies by four different directors. Each is a 30-minute story written around a pop song from the 1960s or 1970s, and each will be filmed using a 16mm camera.

Huang Wen-ying, also art director for Hou's films beginning with Good Men Good Women (1995), will be directing a story about geishas in Taipei during the Japanese colonial era, called A Long Slide into Happiness, Endlessly.

The second story, Say Yes My Boy, to be directed by Wayne Peng, tells of a 17 year-old boy and a woman 13 years his senior who fell in love and opened up a famous Taipei record store in the 1970s. The store sold pirated copies of Billboard Top 10 records, including Glenn Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy.

Chung Meng-hong will be directing Landscape, which talks young people who wanted to see erotic movies back in the day when such movies were strictly banned by the government under martial law. Certain cinema proprietors figured out a way of profiting from this by inserting short clips of pornography into the middle of boring patriotic military movies, in bid to attract more young people to their theaters.

The final story, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was written by Hou Hsiao-hsien himself and is an autobiographical account of a young man's infatuation with one of the woman working in a billiards hall in the 1960s. "Their work consisted merely of keeping score and writing it on the small blackboards. But to the boys, they were dream girls," Hou told the Taipei Times.

In the story the young man develops an intense crush on the woman in the billiards hall and cannot forget about her even after he goes off to military service. On leave from his soldiering, he sets out in search of her, passing through a dozen billiard bars from Kaohsiung, to Tainan, Chiayi and Yulin.

"I finally found her, but my time was up and I needed to go back to my base," Hou said.

An award of US$20,000 may not seem like a lot of money for a film nowadays, but the endorsement by the Pusan Promotional Plan will ensure Hou's success in later fund-raising efforts. Previous forum winners include Korea's Lee Chang-dong, whose Oasis won the Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and China's Liu Bingjian (劉冰鑒), whose Cry Woman went to Cannes this year, as well as Korea's Kim Ki-duk.