FEFF Udine 2025: Hong Kong Legends, Japanese Dolls & Arthouse Distribution

May 03, 2025

This edition of Streamlined is coming to you from the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) in Udine, Italy, where I was covering both the festival and Focus Asia projects market, with the latter focusing on distribution and funding between Asia and Europe.

The Streamlined Guide to Chinese Buyers will be published next week, but the Streamlined Guide to East Asian Co-production Funds will have to wait until after Cannes. I’m always torn between digging deeper on the research, or publishing faster, but usually it makes sense to keep digging. It never fails to amaze me how difficult it is to obtain simple information in Asia that would be freely available in Europe, but I do believe it’s in everyone’s best interests to make the Asian industry more transparent.

**Tony Leung Ka-fai (L) presents the Golden Mulberry to Tsui Hark**

FEFF Welcomes Tsui Hark, Sylvia Chang, Tony Leung Ka-Fai & Assorted Monsters

Two legends of Hong Kong cinema received the Golden Mulberry Award for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s FEFF – director-producer Tsui Hark and actress-director-producer and all-round queen of Asian cinema Sylvia Chang.

The festival screened Tsui’s latest work, Legends Of The Condor Heroes: The Gallants, based on Jin Yong’s wuxia novels and released over Lunar New Year; along with the restored version of his 1984 classic Shanghai Blues and 1993 fantasy drama Green Snake. The Golden Mulberry award was presented by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai, who starred in Legends Of The Condor Heroes and, of course, more than a hundred other Hong Kong movies including Juno Mak’s upcoming Sons Of The Neon Night, which is premiering in Cannes.

Chang, who was born in Taiwan but has contributed to Hong Kong cinema for more than four decades, starred in Shanghai Blues and was also in town for the screening of Daughter’s Daughter, directed by Taiwan’s Huang Xi, which she starred in and executive produced. She also writes and produces, with a focus on encouraging new talent, and has directing credits including Love Education, Murmur Of The Hearts and 20:30:40. While in Udine, I also spotted her name on a poster for a French film, Gilles de Maistre’s Moon Le Panda, currently on release in Italy. I have to admit to being a little bit starstruck when I ran into her at FEFF’s Taiwan party.

**Sylvia Chang heads to the stage to receive FEFF’s Golden Mulberry**

Other stars at the festival included Japan’s Lily Franky, another gracious and elegant guest, who is known internationally for his roles in Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son and Shoplifters, and was in town for Janus Victoria’s Philippines-Malaysia-Japan co-production Diamonds In The Sand. He did however have an unexpected rival for audience attention out of Japan – the doll featured in Yaguchi Shinobu’s horror film Dollhouse, who accompanied the film’s director and producer to all the FEFF events and soon became the star that everyone wanted a selfie with.

Also on a horror note, FEFF featured a sidebar of 12 Asian supernatural, horror and fantasy films that went big on Japanese monsters or ‘yokai’, although it also featured the Chinese folklore of Tsui’s Green Snake, Thailand's krasue floating heads and Southeast Asia’s pontianak spirits. An accompanying exhibition, Mondo Mizuki, Mondo Yokai, featured 100 pieces of artwork, magazines, books and video documents exploring the universe of manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, best known for his yokai stories.

**Yaguchi Shinobu with an unexpected star of FEFF**

Innovative Strategies For Arthouse Distribution

But it’s not all red carpets and grappa at FEFF. Over at Focus Asia, more than 200 industry participants from 40 territories were gathering for three furious days of project market meetings, workshops, labs and panel discussions. Some of the panels focused on Asia’s public funds, which I’ll dive into in an upcoming Streamlined Guide, while others looked at the distribution of European films in Asia and Asian films in Europe.

On the latter subject, which mostly focused on arthouse titles, we heard some inspiring case studies about how films such as Jia Zhangke’s Caught By The Tides and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light were marketed in Italy, Lithuania and Taiwan. Likewise we heard how European films such as Oscar-winning animation Flow, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves and Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow were released in territories including Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. I’m writing an analysis about selling indie films to Asia for Deadline, which will be published during Cannes, but will share a few thoughts based on the Focus Asia panels here.

Of course, it’s always been difficult to release arthouse films, but it seems to have become much harder since the pandemic. Europe has a hardcore cinephile audience, but only certain kinds of arthouse films are working and the distributors of Caught By The Tides and All We Imagine As Light had to work especially hard to promote these movies. Partly, that’s down to changing audience habits, with cinemas losing out to streaming platforms, but there were other factors – Jia’s last film required some knowledge of his previous work to be appreciated fully, and European audiences don’t have many reference points for Indian arthouse films.

More than one panellist at Focus Asia spoke of the need to “prepare the audience” in advance of a release – explaining the history and cultural context of the country that the film originates from, as well as the narrative of the film. Irene Zoccolan of Italy’s Tucker Film, which is affiliated with FEFF and released Caught By The Tides in Italy, explained that stories generally need to be relatable and easy to understand in order to work: “Parasite was a hit but then we didn’t need to prepare the audience. The hardest thing is to widen the audience to go past the usual cinephile cinema lovers.”

In other words, cinema-goers increasingly need to be spoon-fed, which is surprising in an age in which they could just google anything they don’t understand either during or immediately after the screening. Are audiences just getting lazy?

Likewise Asian distributors are facing an uphill battle with both European and Asian arthouse titles, these days facing stiff competition from mainstream Asian movies including horror and Japanese anime – although they’re attempting to lure audiences through strategic timing and innovative marketing. Albert Yao of Taiwan’s Swallow Wings explained that he released All We Imagine As Light at the end of 2024, as he knew India was unlikely to submit the film to the Oscars (India is renowned for making strange submission choices) and it would be better to open the film before the Oscars crush.

Yao also admitted that the rice cooker tie-in for the film wasn’t really a winner (although it sounded like a fab idea to me) but he’s had more success with airline, food and beverage partnerships, limited edition merchandise and collectable items like posters, tote bags, postcards and ticket stubs. Korea’s Emu Artspace, which distributed around five arthouse films last year, found success promoting A Brighter Tomorrow with Italian pizza and Korean soju glasses.

Food is always going to work in Asia, but it also struck me that collectables are a clever way to market arthouse films in this era of growing fan obsession and addictive behaviour. We can no longer show off our DVD collections, so why not display your esoteric taste through a collection of ticket stubs on your bedroom wall? Marketing to women also seems like a good idea, at least mainland Chinese distributors are finding this with the recent success of female-oriented films such as Italy’s There’s Still Tomorrow, as women were always an under-served audience in the era of Jason Statham action movies.

But the overall trends are worrying, and I suspect nobody is currently making much money in arthouse distribution, at least not in Asia. While Asian governments are increasingly pumping money into production, very few are looking at subsidies for distributors and exhibitors, and without some kind of support we’re likely to see much less diversity in theatrical distribution. Releasing arthouse films can’t continue as a labour of love forever.

There also needs to be more focus on cultivating future audiences – at the risk of sounding middle-aged, it would be good to see more programmes introducing kids and teens to cinema, or at least getting them away from phones and toxic social media, otherwise we really will be living in a world where nobody can concentrate for more than 30 seconds. I’m going to leave you with an image below from this year’s FEFF that will hopefully provide some inspiration...the younger, the better. You’re never too small to start going to the cinema.

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Streamlined by Liz Shackleton

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Streamlined by Liz Shackleton

FEFF Udine 2025: Hong Kong Legends, Japanese Dolls & Arthouse Distribution

FEFF Welcomes Tsui Hark, Sylvia Chang, Tony Leung Ka-Fai & Assorted Monsters

Innovative Strategies For Arthouse Distribution

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