Kiwi short film screens at Shanghai film festival
In June 2010 New Zealander Jack Woon received an Asia:NZ arts grant to travel to the Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) where his short film Empty Swan Song was selected in competition for the International Student Shorts Award. The film portrays a young Korean pianist's struggle against rejection in a school concert. The trip enabled Jack to make creative connections with the Chinese film industry and the film department of Shanghai University.
It was an honour not only to be accepted into the festival, but also to be accommodated by the festival for one week. It showed that SIFF was very dedicated to attracting excellent international film-makers, even at a student level.
On registering at the festival, I received a festival pass that gave me access to all of the films, master classes, forums and film markets. I met Jiayi Lu, a student at Shanghai University, whose professor had asked him to volunteer to look after the incoming international students - a United Nations mix of cultures, with representatives from the UK, US, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Israel, Singapore, Russia, Holland and of course one from the little island in the south, New Zealand.
Jiayi was a generous host, and instead of hitting the bars with the other students, I opted to explore the Shanghai University campus with him as my guide. I attended a campus film screening, where we saw some interesting two-minute shorts, as well as my own short film Empty Swan Song. To top off the evening, we had some amazing Szechuan cuisine at the local haunt.
The official SIFF student film screening was held in a lecture theatre above the municipal library. The short films on show were of incredible quality: many were from the top film institutions around the world, most notably the London Film Academy, USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Hamburg Media School. These schools are known to produce work that screens at festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Melbourne, Clermont-Ferrand, Annecy and other well known festivals.
Some institutions like the Hamburg Media School only accept six students into their programme from the whole country, and from their work on screen it was easy to see why they were selected. It was very humbling for a student from the University of Auckland to have his self-funded short filmunexpectedly promoted into these echelons.
After each film the directors were invited on stage for a Q&A session. There were some interesting questions such as, 'What was your film about?', and it was a good opportunity to connect to the audience. And because I could speak Mandarin, I helped ease Jiayi's burden of translation by answering my questions in my mother tongue, which was amusingly applauded by the audience - I guess nobody expected this Kiwi to keep his language.
All the festival participants were also given tickets to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, which I can describe with two words: 'heat' and 'queue'. Infinitely more entertaining was the fact that I could walk into any cinema and watch a festival film... for free! I must have watched about fifteen films during that week. My highlights were Bright Star, Ondine, and a particularly moving Chinese film, Deep In The Clouds, about a small Chinese minority village in the mountains slowly destroyed by the pressures of modernity. If you ever get the chance, check it out.
It is an indescribable honour to be able to travel and exhibit your film to a unique audience, and gratifying to hear how complete strangers receive it. Thanks to Asia:NZ, I was able to meet some spectacularly talented emerging filmmakers, as well as experience a piece of something I can call home, that I had been disconnected from in recent years.