Notizie

Distributors and producers frequently bemoan the difficulty of understanding fast-moving audience trends in China. Affecting the outcome is the scale of country and all are affected by word of mouth driven by ubiquitous social media.

For the tech giants encroaching on the film sector, such as Tencent, the response to such uncertainty is to draw on big data for insight and help in making production, distribution and marketing decisions. For more traditional distributors, such as Bona, the problem is how to strike a balance between having a slate wide enough that it stretches across different genres, and one that has enough tentpoles for the Chinese calendar’s four or five main holiday periods.

Box office in January this year dragged along at levels below 2018’s take. But the Chinese New Year holiday in February was highly competitive and produced the biggest B.O. numbers on record. Bona scored strongly with “Pegasus,...

Hong Kong films that have the prison system as their main theme are a rarity in the local cinema, particularly if we exclude the Cat III ones. “With Prisoners”, which is loosely based on a true story, is one of those rarities.

“With Prisoners” screened at the New York Asian Film Festival

Fan, a young man and an aspiring thug who works as a bouncer in a bar, ends up in juvenile prison (for men aged 14-25), after a brawl with an off-duty cop who was mishandling his girlfriend. In there, he finds out that the military discipline is extended to all aspects of everyday life, including the hours in the courtyard and the meals, while the hazing is utterly brutal. The prisoners are frequently cursed and beaten by the guards, for the smallest of reasons, and they even have to scrub toilets with their bare hands. amonmg a number of other tortures.