A group of heavyweights is trying to build something big in Macau, and for once it’s not a casino.
Media magnate Ricardo Pinto is this week launching the Script Road,
the former Portuguese colony’s first literary festival, with the help
of writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists from China and the
Portuguese-speaking world.
The Chinese territory is best known for its casino industry, which is by far the biggest in the world, racking up more than five times the gambling revenue of the Las Vegas Strip last year.
But Mr. Pinto said he hopes the festival, which he intends to make an
annual event, will celebrate Macau’s unique role as a cultural
crossroads through a series of panels, workshops, film screenings and
concerts.
“The idea is there are several ways of writing,” said Mr. Pinto, 49. “You can write for books, films, songs.”
The festival officially started Sunday and runs to Feb. 4, and will
feature sessions with authors such as China’s Su Tong, who won the Man
Asian Literary Prize in 2009 and whose novella “Wives and Concubines”
was turned into Zhang Yimou’s 1991 Oscar-nominated film “Raise the Red
Lantern.”
The event will also showcase artists for whom Macau has played an important role, such as Portuguese illustrator André Carrilho.
Now a regular contributor to publications such as the New Yorker and
Vanity Fair, Mr. Carrilho got his start drawing cartoons for local
Portuguese-language newspaper Ponto Final at age 17 after his family moved to Macau.
“People need to stop complaining that Macau has no arts scene and
actually do something to change it,” said Mr. Pinto. The Mozambican-born
journalist who moved to Macau in 1990 has been leading the way. He
publishes Ponto Final and dual English- and Chinese-language magazine Macau Closer, in addition to running bookstore Livraria Portuguesa, organizing cultural events and making documentaries.
He is fighting an uphill battle in a city whose crumbling center,
designated a Unesco World Heritage site, is dwarfed by the dozens of
casinos that generate nearly all of its tax money, and whose residents
often eschew higher education and other opportunities to work in them.
Mr. Pinto took over Ponto Final in 2000 after its previous owners
decided they could no longer manage it, launched his magazine in 2007
and started running the historic bookshop jointly sponsored by the
Portuguese government and a private institution in 2010 after its
previous minders abandoned it. He was the only bidder for the five-year
management contract.
Macau Closer editor Nuno Mendonça wrote in the arts magazine’s
January edition that hosting a literary festival in Macau was “a
daunting task, almost like trying to water a desert.”
But Mr. Pinto hopes the festival will both excite Macau’s nascent
literary scene and raise its profile on the international stage. Many of
the visiting authors have accepted the organizers’ invitation to write
stories about Macau after the event. The Script Road is also hosting a
short-story competition open to all. The winning English, Chinese and
Portuguese stories will be published alongside the visiting authors’
contributions.
Mr. Pinto said the festival’s trilingual program was a key aspect of
celebrating Macau’s multiculturalism, though he admitted the organizers
encountered an occasional hiccup with Google Translate.
“I did not go to school in Milwaukee, and I did not write a book called ‘Sex,’” laughed Taiwanese guest writer Lolita Hu,
whose bio has been corrected on the festival’s website. But she said
perhaps she should consider writing such a book, which she imagines
would sell quite well. “A book about sex by someone named Lolita!”
原文網址：http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2012/01/30/in-macau-a-literary-fest-blooms-among-the-casinos/
