By IPS Correspondents
LONDON, May 26 1998 (IPS)

The social, political and economic upheavals in Asia will give the region’s creative community plenty to think about in the months to come – for few things are more guaranteed to set an artist to work than a revolution.

Unfortunately, change in Asia has come on the back of a serious fall in private sector financing. Cinema, which had shown tremendous growth in Asia, can expect to be hit hard as backers take their reduced funds into rather safer investment sectors.

But London cinema-goers had the chance in May to see what the rest of the world will miss if the Asian film industry does slow to a crawl in the coming months. Investors also could judge for themselves the true market value of the Asian movie industry.

London’s Lux Cinema, played host to Britain’s first ever Pan- Asian film festival, highlighting the diverse and exciting work now being produced throughout the region. The movies came from Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, The Phillippines and China, with a special focus on new work by young film-makers from the region.

Among the films on show were Swallowtail Butterfly, directed by Iwai Shunji, with a strong message for Japanese coming to terms with a multicultural society and the corrupting influence of modern technology.

The high speed comedy-drama Push! Push! directed by Park Chul-Soo from South Korea had an unusual setting – a busy maternity ward in Seoul.

The programme also featured a major retrospective of the work of Kim Ki-Young, one of Korea’s most influential filmmakers, who died earlier this year. On show was his 1960 masterwork, The Housemaid, a story of middle-class hypocrisy and sexual tension in the home of a music teacher. Also seen was Kim’s 1972 film The Insect Woman, a satire about a mental hospital that treats people psychologically damaged by their partners’ adultery, and the truly weird Killer Butterfly, in part about a 2,000 year-old woman who keeps her looks by eating human flesh…

Festival co-director Stephen Cremin told IPS that only time would reveal how the current crises in Asia would affect the movie industry.

“Because these events happened so recently it hasn’t yet affected the quantity or quality of films produced,” Cremin said. “But I’m sure that will not be the case next year. Many countries are already cutting back on production money available and this of course will have a knock on affect which will eventually be felt by the filmmakers.”

Economic politics did play one extremely positive part in the Festival’s gestation. When plans to hold the biannual Asia-Europe (ASEM) economic summit in England were announced, it was felt that the event needed some culture to go with the high-power pol iticking.

“The (British) Foreign Office decided that they wanted to build a cultural component, which was us,” Cremin recalled.’We had only four months to mount the entire festival. “Most of my friends said that it would be impossible but we thought this was too good an opportunity to turn down. So we took it, and I guess we succeeded, and now I hope that we have created something which can be held yearly.”

Cremin believes that there are, for filmmakers at least, other positive aspects emerging from the economic and social debates now raging across Asia.

“Countries which until now have always seen themselves as separate – particularly Japan, which always historically looked toward the West – now see that what affects one country in the region will eventually affect the whole region.

“No country can be completely separate from this. There is perhaps a greater sense of Asian unity which probably has not existed before.”

Asian and Europeans found a strong streak of social conscience running through many of the films shown at the Lux Cinema. If the political changes in countries like Indonesia ultimately force changes in the social situations of ordinary people – the poor, old and very young – these films may be used as a handy moral guide to their real problems.

“I think all Asia is going through a major transition. But perhaps Korea more than the rest,” says Cremin. “It’s the country which is being pushed most toward the future and in many ways it’s not necessarily prepared for it.”

Another movie gem turned out to be Long Journey Home, directed by Hanoi’s Le Hoang, a sad tale of a Vietcong soldier’s journey across the country to return one of his comrade’s remains to his remote home village. The film traces the painful legacy of the Vietnam war and the struggle of the country’s people to put the past behind them.

Another movie Promise Of The Flesh, concerns a female prisoner’s trip, under escort, to her mother’s grave. En route she meets and falls in love with a fellow passenger with tragic consequences.

“One of the elements we wanted to concentrate on in this festival was the changing role of women throughout the Asian region,” Cremin added. “We felt that this was a very important issue which is affecting everyone and I thought it was important to show thi s.”

Asian filmmakers, particularly from Japan, have had a seminal influence on Western directors as diverse as Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. Some have found a home in Hollywood, among them two diametrically different artists: the all-action smash-em-up director John Woo and the intellectual, intimate cineaste Ang Lee.

Untouched by the Hollywood machine, and shown as its maker intended, Japan’s charming romantic comedy Shall We Dance, become one of the most successful independent films released in the United States. U.S. president Bill Clinton cited it as his favourite film of the year.

“Besides highlighting the excellence of these films we wanted as well to highlight the issues now affecting Asian countries,” Cremin said. He felt that the west’s present interest in Asian cinema and Asian filmmakers would continue.

“I think that it has a lot to do with nationalism but in a very positive way. These directors don’t try to imitate Hollywood – they are too intelligent to do that. What they successfully do is to draw on their own cultures,” Cremin said.

“One of our directors who attended the festival said in ten years time the dominant cinema would be Asian. I think perhaps he is right.”

The Lux Cinema festival was the first of three Asian film festivals planned for London this year and this prediction could even come true much earlier.

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