Asian cinema reaps the awards in Cannes (Feature)

By Andrew McCathie May 24, 2009, 21:24 GMT

Cannes, France - Asian cinema emerged from this year's Cannes Film Festival with a slew of top prizes, helping to confirm its growing international appeal and its place on the centre stage of global filmmaking.

While the Philippines' Brillante Mendoza won the festival's best director award Sunday for his story of the violent world of Asian gangs in his film Kinatay, Korean director Park Chan Wook's priest- turned-vampire film Bak-Jwi (Thirst) won a prestigious festival jury prize.

Chinese scriptwriter Mei Feng won the best screenplay award for Chinese director Lou Ye's Chun Feng Zui De Ye Wan (Spring Fever).

Lou made the movie despite an official ban on him making films after he found himself facing the wrath of Beijing's conservative film censorship board in 2007 when he submitted to Cannes his Summer Palace without receiving official permission.

In a press conference after the announcement of the award, Lou said he stood with China's young emerging filmmakers. 'They need freedom to create,' he said.

Clandestinely shot in Nanjing in China's east, Spring Fever is a movie about desire that revolves around a passionate affair between a married man and his more openly gay lover.

Altogether six of the 20 movies selected for the race for Cannes' iconic Palme d'Or award were from Asian directors with nations such as India, China, and South Korea having transformed themselves into global movie powerhouses in recent years.

Cannes this year also included an unprecedented four films from the Philippines, including Mendoza's Kinatay. It is also the second consecutive year that a Mendoza film has been selected for the competition for the festival's coveted Palme d'Or following his Serbis screening in the 2008 festival.

With signs of a strong domestic movie market driven by a home- grown product, the Asian movie business continues to grow in international stature spurred on by the digital revolution and Hollywood remakes of Asian film hits.

Indeed, countries that were once barely recognizable dots on the world cinema map have been propelled into the top league of movie- making.

But apart from the economic fallout from the global recession, a shortage of money and the battle against piracy, the real challenge for Asia's cinema success - and its sustainability on the market - is connecting with international audiences.

A surge in TV production has also allowed Japan's cinema industry to emerge from a period of stagnation, and Beijing's ambitions to be a major cinema force have driven Chinese movie making ahead.

However, despite the restrictions on filmmaking in China, including the often dead hand of the nation's studio system and censors, the country's movie business appears to be full of confidence at the moment.

But the question is how long this will last: Many Chinese directors are still battling to break out of the international film festival circuit and to find a global audience among mainstream moviegoers.

Most of all, however, it has been the digital revolution that has been the godsend to smaller Asian nations.

By cutting production costs, digital technology has helped directors from nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia draw audiences, challenging even Hollywood and the giants of the Asian movie business - China, Korea, India, and Japan.

Park Chan-Wook's success in Cannes is also likely to help the crisis-hit Korean movie industry to believe that it has finally started to turn the corner after a few bleak years caused by overproduction and soaring costs.

His movie was also the first South Korean film to be co-produced by a major Hollywood studio.

The awarding this year of the jury prize for Thirst came six years after the Korean director won Cannes' Grand Prix in 2003 for Old Boy, about a man escaping from being held captive in a trashy hotel room.