Photo: Berlin Film Festival
Independent films such as Ivy Ho’s Memento -like temporal experiment Claustrophobia (2008) and Simon Chung’s End of Love (2009), about a male sex worker, managed to get selected by Berlinale in the Panorama section, which showcases new independent and art-house films that have "controversial subjects or unconventional aesthetic styles," (2) while Dante Lam’s The Beast Stalker (2008) was shown at Forum . It was not long ago when Edmond Pang Ho Cheung’s Isabella received a Silver Bear for Best Music in 2006. While the performance of Hong Kong cinema at Berlinale looks positive, it is worth noting that Berlinale remains relatively generous by showing films from everywhere, especially after the end of the Cold War when it gradually transformed from a political-ideological window showcasing Western films to promote Western ideologies to a more global venue where films from Eastern Europe and from further East are shown.
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