There are few things more delightful than witnessing an honest piece of creative work enfolding before your eyes. I experienced that same delight not once, but on five different occasions over the past couple of weeks at the 37th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF).

Festivals of this nature always excite me – make me feel like that proverbial kid in a candy store. And I surely would have watched more than the five movies I did if I weren’t distracted by more mundane worldly engagements. Nevertheless, the ones I did were exemplary and here’s a wrap:

1. After Lucia (2012)

This Mexican movie begins with chef Roberto and his daughter Alejandra moving to a new city to try to recover after the death of Roberto’s wife. A visibly disturbed Roberto tries to start a new restaurant from scratch while Alejandra tries to settle in with her new found friends in her new school. Things seem to be changing for the better, when a compromising video footage of Alejandra and her schoolmate Jose starts doing the rounds in the school. This incites a diabolic episode of bullying. A fellow schoolmate attracted to Jose leads the lot as the high school students consumed in hate, jealousy and sadistic pleasure publicly insult, defecate on and even rape Alejandra in subsequent scenes whose atrocity will make you squirm. A chilling scene in the movie is where a stoic Roberto, when apprised of what has transpired throws a tied-up Jose from a boat into the deep sea waters.

2. A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)

“We are always eating from the trash can of ideology” is the underlying message in Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek’s amusing dialectic monologue. Much like his earlier offering A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the film revolves around the director using sequences from famous movies like The Sound of Music, Titanic, MASH, A Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver and turning their inherent logic on their heads. While one may not want to digest all of what Zizek has to say, provocative dialogues like “communism a world where everyone is allowed to dwell in their own stupidity” delivered in his signature style on the very set of the movies he’s discussing make for brilliant viewing.

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