The influences of uptake technological innovation in Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF)

Abstract

Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) is the oldest film festival in Hong Kong. At its inception, its program consisted of film screening only and then the festival opened a special section dedicated to Hong Kong movies in the second year. In 2009, the festival started to showcase restoration classics from America, Europe and China.

Over the years, HKIFF was recognized as one of the important global film festivals, offering networking and investment opportunities for the global film industry. The festival produced a number of showcases on special film focus, retrospective on respectable filmmakers. Giving out a sense of the culture-making activity that happens in these spaces, HKIFF was instrumental in building a solid base of art film audience. Ever since the festival had gone independent from Urban Council, Leisure and Cultural Services Department (1977 to 2001) and Hong Kong Arts Development Council (2002 to 2004) in 2005, the festival provides nutrients to home grown film professionals such as film directors, film critics, historian and curators for several decades.

Nowadays, HKIFF has developed a membership system. Except the International Film Festival held in March and April every year, it also organizes a number of events over the whole year. HKIFF not only attracts local audience, but also international filmmakers, producers and investors. HKIFF serves as a hub for the local film industry, so as to keep in touch with the worldwide film world.

After Goddard declared the death of film in 2000, the movie industry and the world have taken up many technological innovations, including digital technology, the ubiquitous internet in 1990s, the arrival of 3D cinema in 2009, followed by the raise of video-on-demand and Youtube video, crowd funding and crowd authorship. This paper will look into how these innovations affect the practice and hence the operation, the curation and the marketing strategies of HKIFF. Furthermore, we will also discuss how these changes drive the film culture in HK.