The Hong Kong International Film Festival has been showing my films, shorts and features, for about ten years so they finally decided to hold a retrospective of my work. And they generously invited me to attend.
Knowing that China in particular and Asia in general have become large buyers of animation I decided to attend, hoping to do a lot of business and to spread the Plympton brand throughout Asia.
One of the best parts was flying for fifteen hours on Cathay Pacific because they had over 300 feature films to choose from for their individual movie screens. I was in film heaven- literally.
I was also put up in the very fancy W Hotel. The magnificent swimming pool overlooked the Hong Kong harbor from the 70th floor so it was quite a vista when every morning I did my 10 laps.
The festival was very well organized and after 34 years has build up a very large and loyal audience. I was totally shocked when I visited my first screening. It was large and packed full of screaming fans. They knew all about my films and me. I was so excited; I gave all of the attendees a personal drawing that took almost an hour.
I then did another appearance at the Hong Kong University film class and that was packed! I was in China about proper 8years ago and sold some of my DVD’s and my guess is that they’ve been pirated like crazy and so I probably have an underground following all over China.
In fact on my off day I visited the bazaar where they had countless stalls of genre DVD’s, very obscure stuff and Hollywood films. Of course they were all illegal but that’s the norm in China. So I guess I’m one of the pirated directors now.
In any case I was happy for the adulation especially in the home of one of my favorite brands of film Hong Kong cinema.
On the scale of 1-10, I give the Hong Kong International Film Festival a 9. Thanks guys for the great time.
sometimes i get the feeling you're really into yourself.
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