The 2019 Festival de Cannes Will Take Place In Asia For The First Time

In spite of groundbreaking films such as Crazy Rich Asians, Hollywood has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to Asian representation—be it in blockbuster movies or television series. Perhaps the Asian debut of Festival de Cannes in Hong Kong can serve as inspiration to the industry that given us icons such as Lucy Liu and Mindy Kaling, to name a few.

Pierre Lescure, President of Festival de Cannes and Thierry Frémaux, General Delegate of Festival de Cannes, team with Adrian Cheng, founder of K11 Group, to bring Festival de Cannes to Asia for the first time ever. The prestigious film festival will be held in Hong Kong's K11 MUSEA retail and arts complex from 12 to 17 November. The Festival de Cannes Film Week will present six selected films and invite industry professionals to showcase their work and practices through a series of question and answer sessions and masterclasses.

In a press release sent out earlier this week, Lescure and Frémaux  had this to say about the event:

“The story of Festival de Cannes Film Week began in Buenos Aires almost ten years ago with the idea of taking the spirit of the Festival on a global journey, thereby continuing the dialogue with people from all over the world who visit us in Cannes every year in May and creating a cinema moment with a unique format. At the Festival de Cannes we invite the whole world to come to Cannes to celebrate the art of filmmaking, to discover the latest works of great contemporary directors and to get a taste for what is up and coming in the world of cinema. With our Festival de Cannes Film Week, we hope to initiate the very opposite by taking to the road and bringing the spirit of the Festival and the work of artists to other parts of the globe. There is no better place to extend this experience than Hong Kong which has seen the origins of so many great filmmakers who have come to show their films in Cannes!”

Hong Kong has given us Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, whom are arguably the two most prominent stars to have crossed over to Hollywood. It's also given us prolific film directors such as Wong Kar-wai, who's talents were not only recognised by Hollywood but by the American fashion industry as well. He was enlisted as an adviser for the 2015 Met Gala, which was documented in Andrew Rossi's documentary The First Monday In May. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the world-renowned festival will be taking place in the vibrant city of Hong Kong.

Whichever way you look at it, it's definitely a step in the right direction. Perhaps, we'll one day see it being held in India, which is home to the largest film-producing industry in the world—Bollywood.

For more information, visit their website.

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