"Contemporary Filmmakers" is a new section established at this year's Shanghai International Film Festival. It aims to focus on important filmmakers active in the industry today, and by combing through their works, it focuses on the creators of this era who cannot be ignored.
The first contemporary filmmaker in this section is a creator who keeps pace with the times and never stops moving forward. He depicts the little people in the great era with affectionate and delicate brushstrokes - he is Chen Kexin.
As a descendant of overseas Chinese in Thailand, Chen Kexin was born and raised in Hong Kong. He moved back to Thailand briefly as a teenager, and later studied in the United States. By chance, he entered the industry, starting as a translator and gradually grew into a filmmaker who is both a director and a producer.
As a creator with diverse backgrounds, Chen Kexin excels at approaching cross-cultural contexts from a unique perspective. In the process of in-depth creation, he always maintains a keen insight into reality, writing those small but profound marks of life between the times and the individual.
In the 1990s, Peter Chan began his directorial career. In Almost a Love Affair, Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung's misplaced lives on the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui and New York's Chinatown are not only an epic of urban love, but also an allegory of identity on the eve of Hong Kong's return. With the Best Picture Award at the Academy Awards, he had quietly torn apart the inherent label of "Hong Kong films".
He grafted the genes of Hong Kong-style genre films onto the real soil of the mainland, and used a play within a play to deconstruct cultural identity in If Love. The Warlords tore open the false prosperity of costume blockbusters, and Chinese Partners accurately hit the narrative beat of the "Chinese Dream". This strategy is not a compromise, but rather transforms "Hong Kongness" into a more hidden author symbol - just like Li Qiao's constantly corrected Cantonese accent in Almost a Love Story, Chen Kexin's film language always carries a sense of hybridity.
This image nomad with silver-rimmed glasses has always calibrated the balance between commercial gears and author expression. In his nearly 40-year film career, Chen Kexin has traveled between the mainland, Hong Kong and international film circles, directed nearly 17 works, and produced nearly 40 works. In 2023, at the SIFF Film School Master Class, he called himself an optimistic pessimist. "Life is bound to encounter many troubles and many problems, but optimism lies in the present. When you are optimistic, you are happy at the moment. As for the final result, you imagine that the result is the best, because at least you make money in the present. This is my attitude towards life and my attitude towards making movies."
【Screening List】
Almost a Love Story (1996)
Highlights: Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai interpret urban drifting love
"Comrades: Almost a Love Story" is not only a touching love story of Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung, but also a milestone work of director Peter Chan in establishing the important status of Chinese-language films. The film depicts the fate of two strangers who met, missed and reunited in Hong Kong, and delicately outlines the urban emotions and changes of the times during the immigration wave in the 1990s.
Unlike Hong Kong films of the same period that emphasized typology and commerciality, Chen Kexin, as an author-director, precisely integrated industrial production with humanistic care, allowing "Comrades: Almost a Love Story" to achieve a high degree of unity in narrative, photography, music and performance, with a strong cross-cultural appeal. The film swept all major film awards, and with its unstoppable momentum, it almost swept all the major awards of the Academy Awards that year, and has long been at the top of the list of "Most Popular Chinese Romance Films", which also marked the official start of the director's creative path of "conquering the market with emotion".
If Love (2005)
Highlights: A milestone in Chinese original musicals, an excavation of the famous fireworks scene of Zhou Xun and Takeshi Kaneshiro on the set
"If Love" is a landmark work of director Peter Chan's brave expansion in the Chinese film industry. It is also a rare large-scale original musical romance film in the early 21st century. The film combines song and dance, love, and meta-narrative structure. It focuses on a love story that spans ten years, interweaving reality and memories, and presenting the entanglement of emotions and dreams. Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhou Xun, and Jacky Cheung co-starred, and with the blessing of music and choreography, the entire film has a very high artistic texture.
As a work that was selected as the closing film of the Venice Film Festival and represented Hong Kong in the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, "If Love" not only refreshed the industrial standards of Chinese-language musicals, but also broadened the narrative boundaries of commercial genre films, becoming an important practice of Chen Kexin in genre fusion and production model.
The Warlords (2007)
Highlights: The bloody brothers are full of righteousness, and the epic masterpiece questions people's hearts
Starring Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro, The Warlords is adapted from the "Assassination of Ma Chao" in the late Qing Dynasty. It is an epic masterpiece that combines history, war and brotherhood. It tells the tragic story of three sworn brothers who betrayed each other due to differences in faith, love and power in the turmoil of war.
Director Peter Chan breaks the traditional narrative paradigm of martial arts or loyalty, re-examining the irreconcilable conflicts between "righteousness" and "profit", "love" and "power" from a modern perspective, giving the film a deep metaphor of reality and a questioning of human nature. Behind the grand war scenes and superb acting, "The Warlords" is a breakthrough in the industrial level of Chinese-language commercial genre films, and is considered an important exploration of Peter Chan's genre fusion and narrative structure.
China Partner (2013)
Highlights: Grassroots counterattack, Chinese dream creates entrepreneurial legend
"Chinese Partners" is set in the 1980s and 1990s. It tells the story of three young people with dreams - Cheng Dongqing, Meng Xiaojun and Wang Yang, from campus to entrepreneurship, from ideals to reality, and ultimately to success.
The film depicts the youth of an era and their fighting spirit with a narrative that emphasizes both passion and warmth. Chen Kexin continues his keen sense of reality, closely combining individual growth with the changes of the times, not only creating down-to-earth and idealistic characters, but also showing the rise of Chinese private enterprises.
With its exquisite commercial packaging and moving emotional clues, the film set a high box office after its release, becoming a phenomenal work, and also opened up new possibilities for mainstream commercial films to tell "Chinese stories".
Note: If the film list changes, please refer to the actual schedule.
