The Far East Film Festival has deep roots in Hong Kong cinema—the spark that ignited the first edition in 1999 came from a Hong Kong film retrospective. But does it still make sense to speak of Hong Kong cinema now that the Chinese government has erased what made that place distinct? The FEFF continues to catalog Hong Kong films separately from Chinese ones, and it still manages to find something worth watching.
Take Lawrence Kan's In Broad Daylight, drawn from investigative journalism published in 2016, when Hong Kong still had press freedom. The city's licensed nursing homes cannot accommodate demand; many private facilities have opened without authorization. In one such home, housing elderly people and those with physical and intellectual disabilities, a journalist poses as the granddaughter of a resident and begins her investigation through observation, listening to patient accounts, and gathering photographic and video evidence. She uncovers abuses that shock. Yet exposing truth to the public does not always serve justice. The screenplay—with a slight narrative twist—offers more ethical dilemmas than a typical investigative journalism film. You might suspect the journalist craves a story more than patient welfare, yet her concern feels genuine. The facility manager, the "villain," is visually impaired and can argue, despite the evidence against him, that he understands his patients precisely because he is like them. It is admirable that the abuses are shown indirectly: by suggesting rather than depicting them, the film makes clearer why such abuses are hard to expose and prosecute without direct witnesses.
The FEFF is unintimidated by Chinese pressure on Taiwan—the independent state China claims as its own and demands be called Chinese Taipei—and again this year screens Taiwanese films. From Taiwan comes the tender and aching Trouble Girl by Chin Chia-hua. The girl of the title, Xiao-xiao, is in fifth grade. She has ADHD, and managing her is not easy. Her divorced mother shows little patience. She is in a relationship with Xiao-xiao's teacher, hidden from the school, and he tries everything to help but often feels like an outsider to the family. The school scenes are crucial to grasping the social drama of her condition: a volatile, unpredictable student disrupts her classmates and can pose a real danger. Yet without guidance on how to treat her, they become cruel, provoke her, bully her. What makes this sorrowful film remarkable is its balance and honesty: it lays bare a difficult social problem without resorting to cheap emotion or a false happy ending, instead opening ground for genuine conversation among all the different people who must contend with ADHD.
Staying with the theme of parents and children, FEFF 26 was won by another moving but less bitter film, the Japanese Takano Tofu by Mitsuhiro Mihara: a story of the strong bond between an elderly tofu maker and his forty-year-old daughter, between honoring tradition and embracing change.