| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, November 11, 2010 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Asian Institute | Reel Asian Panel Discussion
Program:
4:00-6:00 Panel discussion and Q&A
6:00 Informal reception
Synopsis:
A discussion of Gallants, directed by Clement Sze-Kit Cheng and Derek Chi-kin, a hit film in Hong Kong this year that brings together many of the old masters of the kung fu film for a final showdown in the streets of Hong Kong. Not unlike the recent American effort, Expendables (2010), Gallants is both homage and a pastiche. The revisitation of favourite genres and stars has become a trend in recent Hong Kong filmmaking, and this panel will seek to explore its sources and implications through a dialogue between critics and the film’s co-director, Clement Cheng.
Panelists:
CLEMENT SZE-KIT CHENG, co-director and screenwriter of Gallants, did his high school education in Vancouver and has worked in the Hong Kong film industry since 1998, starting as an art director. He wrote scripts and was second unit director for Moss (2008) and Skyline Cruisers (2000), as well as commercials and music videos. Gallants is his debut as a feature film director.
PROFESSOR KATHERINE SPRING (Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) received her PhD in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2007). Her research interests include film sound and music, American film history, and East Asian cinemas. She has published essays and reviews in Cinema Journal, Music and the Moving Image, and Film International, and contributed an essay on Johnnie To to the Hong Kong anthology, Milkyway Image: Beyond Imagination.
COLIN GEDDES is one of Toronto’s best known film programmers. He chooses films for the Toronto International Film Festival’s Real to Reel, Vanguard, Visions and the Midnight Madness programs. A specialist in Asian cinema, Geddes also selects films for Golden Classics Cinema, TIFF Cinematheque, and FantAsia (Toronto). Geddes is now also Festival Director for ActionFest in Asheville, North Carolina. For more than a decade, Geddes curated the Kung Fu Fridays screening series, which showcased martial arts and cult cinema from Asia. Over the past fifteen years, Geddes has rescued abandoned 35mm prints of Chinese films. Recently, he donated 200 feature films from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the University of Toronto. Geddes’s distribution company Ultra 8 Pictures is dedicated to bringing offbeat international films to Canadian movie theatres.
BART TESTA is senior lecturer at the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto. His teaching includes courses on Chinese cinemas, genre films, European art films and avant-garde cinema. He has authored two books on experimental films, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (1993) and Spirit in the Landscape (1989) and edited an anthology on Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as journal articles and anthologized essays.
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