Macau’s Storytellers
Local independent film makers shoot together in Macau.
As more and more foreigners turn their eyes toward Macau for its legendary entertainment sector, featuring tourism and gambling businesses, local people realise that the images representing Macau as the Las Vegas of the East are often just too fancy to be true. For some, who have been living here since childhood and adolescence, the new legacy of Macau as promoted by hotel and casino advertisements says nothing about how they really feel about their own city. With that in mind, local film maker Albert Chu initiated an ambitious project in an attempt to redefine the city’s identity. Macau Who am I? was begun in the year 2006, and the first part of it was already shown as a documentary film in the Macau Fringe Festival of November 2007. Started in 2008, the preparation of the second part, The Parish Stories, has gradually reached the final shooting stages in the last two months. In an interview with CLOSER, Albert Chu suggested that the film is being prepared for submission to the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival in September and will soon be released at the Macau Cultural Centre.
Divided into four sections, the multi-directorial film is composed of a series of short stories created by local filmmakers Vincent Hoi, Ho Ka Cheng, Chan Ka Keong and Albert Chu, himself. As the initiator of the project, Albert Chu explained that since Macau is officially divided into different neighbourhoods according to the names of their various churches, he wanted to make use of this background and create a series of local “Parish Stories” that provide “an insider’s view on people’s life” in Macau. According to the preference of each individual director, four different districts were chosen, each belonging to one of three parishes. The Our Lady of Fátima Parish includes the Ilha Verde (Green Island) District, the St. Lazarus Parish is home to both the Three Lamps District near Avenida de Horta e Costa and The Old Ladies’ House District near Tap Seac Square, and from the St. Anthony Parish the Camões Garden District was chosen.
During the last two months’ shooting, the entire crew of no less than 20 people was seen here and there on Macau’s most typical streets, filming scene after scene, composing stories originating on the small plot of land that is Macau.
Young film maker Ho Ka Cheng was the first one to begin shooting. A graduate of the National Taiwan University of Arts with a bachelor’s degree in cinema, Ho Ka Cheng returned to Macau in 2007 and is currently working as a visual arts teacher at the S. José de Brito School. When asked why he chose Ilha Verde (Green Island) as the setting for his film The Best Times, The Worst Times, the 29 year-old director said his whole family has been living in this area for more than 30 years. “The Green Island became an inhabited district a long time ago. It was used to settle victims of conflagrations in Macau, so most of the housing built there was considered temporary,” Ka Cheng explained. With this as the film’s background, the story unfolds around a stranger from the Mainland. Played by Dicky Tsang, the 30-year-old Mainland visitor is seen wandering around the streets of Green Island District among half demolished temporary housing as if looking for something. “There is not even a single line of dialogue in this film,” Dicky said. “It was kind of difficult because Ka Cheng did not want me to act ‘too much’, and I am used to acting in the theatre. He wanted the drama to be as light as possible.” Ka Cheng added, “He is there to search for something, and I want the story to unfold slowly without any rush.” An atmosphere of weightlessness is introduced as a sharp contrast to the heavy economic boom of Macau’s recent years. “As we can see from history, this place has remained marginal and a symbol of poverty for a long time. Today, there are several big economic housing projects planned for the area. In a way, it is still a place for the government to settle the poor people. The question remains whether the economic prosperity of Macau can really be shared by all of us.”
The next locale belongs to the St. Lazarus Parish and is situated in front of
the Old Ladies’ House. On the heels of his last, feature-length film, Before Dawn Cracks, released at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival in September 2007, Vincent Hoi includes his latest film, Paper Plane, in The Parish Stories project. “This is actually the first time I’m making a short film. It runs only 20 minutes. In my point of view, short films are much more fun to make. In a feature-length film you have to consider very carefully the reaction of the audience, because if they feel bored, they are not likely to watch your film for more than 60 minutes. But with a 20-minute short film, you can go ahead with some crazy ideas, and it won’t last long enough for the audience to really hate it!” Vincent says, laughing. As in his last film, Vincent has chosen again to shoot at night time. It’s a story about an encounter between a 50 year-old casino manager and an 18 year-old young person that takes place right in front of the Old Ladies’ House.
The man has just turned 50 that night and is feeling terribly lonely and sad, feeling he has lost the ideals he had when he was 18. Then he meets this unknown young person and starts talking about his past. The night goes on as if in a dream. “It is a film about loneliness,” Vincent said. “He might well be talking to himself, really. I do that too sometimes, especially when I’m doing the editing and realise the computer has just shut down and I didn’t save. I would even shout to myself in that case,” he laughs again. Even though Vincent jokes a lot and is very talkative, his films are often quite dark and lonely. For this film, his crazy idea is in fact a daring scene that takes place right in the middle of Tap Seac Square. “I had this idea to burn a camping tent in Tap Seac Square, but I hesitated a lot because I was afraid it would cause trouble for the neighbourhood. The more I considered, the more I worried about it. Then one night, my collaborator called and said I shouldn’t think anymore, just do it.” So they went ahead and managed to create a beautiful scene with the flames of a burning tent being reduced to ashes. The director concluded, “There are things that cannot be traced back when they are gone.”
As a younger film maker, Chan Ka Keong has a different concern compared with Vincent’s. Soon to reach the age of 30, Ka Keong is more attracted to issues of sentiment and relationship. He has decided to set his story in the Pigeon’s Nest Area, another name for the Camões Garden District. “Situated right behind the Ruins of St. Paul’s, this area is the second densest residential district in Macau, ranking just after the Northern District. Amid all the frantic changes in Macau during recent years, this area has miraculously remained one of the rare places hardly affected at all. Take the road signs, for example; they are still the old model ones.” Ka Keong continues to explain, “Because there are many people living in this area, I decided that my story should happen among them, here.”
Centred on the lives of two women, one 17 years old and the other 27, the film Expectation is composed of bits of discussions and dialogues. Before starting filming, Ka Keong conducted research about young women by browsing through blogs on the internet. “In the beginning, I wanted the film to be like a kind of observation. I was curious and wanted to understand the sentimental condition of women as they grow from teenagers into maturity. I learnt a lot more, indeed, during the research phase.” As Ka Keong went deeper, through discussions via the internet and inside his circle of friends, he realised that the real issue is situated between “fantasy and anxiety about the future.” “It is a feeling of uncertainty. It exists in a very subtle way. We all dream about the future, but at the same time we feel bounded by the concrete reality that is the present. What I wanted to do with this film is show the sensitivities found on the psychological level through the encounter of these two women who normally would have nothing to do with each other. But in my film, fantasy and anxiety are put together and examined from a close up angle,” he concluded.
For Albert Chu’s story, The Right Time, the director chose a more autobiographical approach. “I grew up in the District of Costa and am still living here. Recently, I lost my mother, and during this time I’ve had a very special feeling about this place. I guess I want to externalise these feelings through my
story,” he said. The story has three main characters: an old woman, a man and a girl. It takes place in the Three Lamps District near Costa. The old woman is about to leave for a retirement home and wants to keep some memory of the place where she’s been living for a long time. She suggests that her neighbour, a photography teacher, help her. The man has just lost his mother, and he decides to help this old neighbour. As they begin the project, the photography teacher meets a female student, and the three of them decide to make a photo project together. “The film lasts 20 minutes, and I have filmed 40 different scenes, but I didn’t want to make the story too dramatic; I want it to be like daily life. Sometimes feelings can be conveyed only when drama is reduced to the minimum possible.”
Scene by scene and story after story, the audience will be guided through the streets of Macau in order to rediscover the sensitivity unique to the hearts of its residents.
Through the eyes of these filmmakers, we will be able to share those memories situated between personal life and the collective community. “It is all about the sense of timing in life. I simply feel this is the right time to create a project out of something we are all familiar with but might have forgotten. That is our Macau,” Albert Chu concluded with his usual smile.