Over the years, two festival guests I have particularly good memories of are Ray Harryhausen and David Bordwell. Does this happen at other festivals? None that I’ve been to, anyway. The lineups are linked to another festival characteristic, the easy mixing between the public, critics, filmmakers, industry types, festival organizers and programmers, publishers and special guests, talking movies while waiting in queues, mingling in the lobby or lifting pints into the early hours at a nearby pub. well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d have a whole lot of nickels. An untold number of creative projects have sprung from chance meetings between people lining up for films or tickets, and if I had a nickel for every time somebody has told me they’d met their partner while waiting in line at Fantasia. If in that first summer those of us standing in line became aware of the existence of an ever-growing group of like-minded cinephiles, this was only the beginning. The long Fantasia lineups themselves would in time become something of a legend. It wasn’t that these films were as good as mainstream Hollywood cinema they were better. What impressed me was the way the filmmakers made up for the ragged plotting and uneven script through extensive location shooting and staging the action at a hell of a clip in the best traditions of low budget genre cinema. The second is the lesser known Organized Crime & the Triad Bureau, a fast-moving thriller made with verve and pace where cops battle criminals in a morally ambiguous universe. The first is Fong Sai Yuk, a period martial arts film starring Jet Li that featured ingeniously choreographed action scenes that provided a showcase for the star’s trademark athleticism that worked much better than it had a right to because of the wit and intelligence with which it was made and the way it proved that Li could be a gifted comic actor when given the right material. Two films I’d particularly like to single out, not because they were the best films I saw that year (nothing topped John Woo’s brilliant Bullet in the Head), but because they made such a strong impression on me at the time. Some of those lining up already knew about these films through various underground scenes, but for many others, including me, they were a revelation. Fantasia offered some of that, but also served up popular genre cinema: martial arts and other types of action films, comedies, horror and fantasy flicks that traditional festivals had always tended to pass on. It’s not that that there weren’t film festivals in the city before, but they had tended toward either art films or mainstream commercial fare from other countries. The little festival with no publicity and no sponsors had become a word-of-mouth phenomenon, half uncovering and half creating an audience for a type of cinema that had largely been invisible in Montreal. Well before the end of the festival, they were running completely around the block. Soon the theatres were full and queues were forming on the street and every day the lineups seemed to be longer. More than a little intrigued, I promptly bought a festival pass, and when I returned the next day, something funny happened. And, for added attraction, there was also Japanese anime and a clutch of Godzilla movies on offer. I liked them all, of course, but they hadn’t come close to preparing me for the whole new world of cinema found in the Fantasia program: John Woo, Chow Yun-fat and Jackie Chan were joined by Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Ringo Lam, Leslie Cheung, Stephen Chow, Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, Simon Yam, Anthony Wong, Johnnie To, Donnie Yen, Chingmy Yau, Andy Lau, Samo Hung, Tsui Hark, and on and on and on, in a brilliantly cherry-picked selection of early-90s Hong Kong genre cinema, including Bullet in the Head, City on Fire, Fist of Legend, Iron Monkey, the two-part A Chinese Odyssey, Full Contact, The Untold Story, My Father Is a Hero, and The Story of Ricky. I had caught festival screenings of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, watched The Killer in a largely empty first-run cinema, and seen a couple of Jackie Chan films. As a film nut, I was aware of the buzz growing around the new Hong Kong cinema in the 90s – Time magazine had a story, Quentin Tarantino announced he was a fan – but I had actually seen very little of it.
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