Law Kar: When I was in the university, I felt in love with cinema, because maybe I studied mathematics a bit too much and had too much homework. At the end of the day I’d take a train to the town centre and go to the movies. That’s how I felt in love with the movies, because I hate regular courses, writing and doing a lot of exercises. Movies were a good entertainment for me and something to talk [about] with my friends. After graduation, I happened to work with a weekly magazine, and they had a page on cinema, and I became the editor of the cinema page. I really liked reading and going to the movies and belonging to a group of authors of the same age. That was in the 1960s. I was attracted by the new cinema of the world, especially the French New Wave. From the 1960s, we became some kind of critics. That set the basis for my film studies on that kind of filmmakers. For some years I worked for the press and for some magazines, and then for ten years I worked for a [local] TV station and for cinemas.
In the 1990s, I was recommended by Albert Lee, and I came to work for the HKIFF. I worked there for more than ten years, I think 11 years, and since then I’ve had stronger and stronger interest in the research on HK and Chinese cinema. Not just writing reviews, but researching the history with historical materials of Chinese cinema, you know, films, and image or printed materials. And so I came onboard as a programmer of the HK retrospective section. I had to see a lot of old films from China and Hong Kong and then organize seminars, conferences, and edit books and do programming.
From 1990 on, I began, so to speak, to research on Chinese cinema. And that interest has last up until now. Now I am not in the researching section, I am in the programming section, for theatres, for outside shows and for the film festival. I myself would like to write and do my private research on subject like Chinese and HK cinema. |