Word: kong
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...While some filmmakers are lucky enough to secure funding from elsewhere - Yu Lik-wai's Venice competition entry Plastic City has partners in Hong Kong, Brazil, Japan, France and China - the choice facing most directors is stark. "You either do very low-budget films for the local market, or some side markets like Southeast Asia, or you do really huge, huge-budget films as a co-production with China," says Lau. Medium-sized productions are few, meaning that up-and-coming directors are finding it hard to make the transition to mainstream features. Occasionally, established filmmakers will nurture prot...
...dominating the city's movie houses this season - John Woo's Chinese historical drama Red Cliff, which with its estimated $80 million budget is Asia's most expensive movie to date. The trend for increasingly expensive epics will eventually lose steam, of course. But nobody is sure that Hong Kong's film industry will be ready with a replacement when it does...
...This imbalance is perhaps most evident in the city's strife-ridden labor market. The number of workers employed in the gaming and recreation sectors nearly tripled between 2003 and 2007 to 69,000, but many of the new jobs were filled by foreign workers from China, Hong Kong and the Philippines. In 2003, approximately one out of every 10 jobs was filled by a foreigner. By the first quarter of this year, that ratio rose to one in four. Although many of the choicest positions are reserved by regulation for locals - all card dealers in casinos, for example, must...
...became Chief Executive of the Macau Special Administrative Region when it was returned to China by Portugal in 1999. When Ho took over, Macau was economically dormant. The gaming industry was a moribund monopoly controlled by tycoon Stanley Ho (who is unrelated to Edmund). Many residents of nearby Hong Kong stayed away from the city's seedy casinos because they feared they might be caught up in the occasional burst of gunfire on the streets between rival triad gangsters...
...having already contended with a noisy democracy movement in Hong Kong, Beijing has no taste for another in Macau. So the city's government is starting to tackle local problems. It is in the process of revising labor laws to provide greater protection for local workers, and in July, the Finance Secretary, Tam Pak-yuen, implored the casino operators to promote Macanese to higher managerial positions. Backed by Beijing, Ho is also putting the brakes on Macau's casino boom. In April, he froze the issuance of new gaming concessions and imposed a moratorium on new casino projects, beyond those...