Too many festival films, not enough time: read the interviews instead
A festival programme is fifty films you have never heard of. The trailers and director Q&As are on YouTube, and reading them takes a fraction of the time watching does.
Festival season in Hong Kong has a particular problem. The programme lands with dozens of titles, most of them without a review yet, and the good sessions sell out before anyone you trust has seen the film. What you do have is video: trailers, press conferences, director Q&As from earlier festivals, the occasional long interview. The difficulty is time. Forty minutes of Q&A per film, across a shortlist of fifteen, is a week of evenings.
Reading is faster. A transcript of a forty-minute conversation can be skimmed in three minutes, searched in seconds, and it tells you most of what you need to decide whether to book.
How to do it
1. Find the right video
Search the film's title with "Q&A", "interview" or "press conference" as well as "trailer". A director talking for half an hour about why they made the film tells you far more than two minutes cut to sell it. Festival channels and the distributor's own channel are the most likely to have proper captions.
2. Turn it into text
Paste the link into a tool that reads the video's captions and lays them out as text with timestamps — you can get a free transcript of any YouTube video that has a caption track. It takes a few seconds, and you end up with something you can read at your own speed instead of scrubbing through a player.
3. Search it for what matters to you
You rarely need the whole thing. Search for the words that decide it for you:
- The language. "Cantonese", "Mandarin", "dialect", "English" — the Q&A often says what the film is actually spoken in, which the programme sometimes does not.
- The length and the pace. Directors are candid about a slow film in a way trailers never are.
- What it is about, in their words. A synopsis is written to sell; an answer to an audience question usually is not.
- Anything you would rather know first. Violence, animals, a subject close to home — search for it rather than sitting through the whole interview hoping it comes up.
4. Jump back to the moment
When a line matters, click its timestamp and listen to that part. Captions mishear names and film titles, and a transcript is only as good as the captions under it. For anything you are going to act on, check it against the audio.
What a transcript will not do
It only exists where the video has captions. A Q&A filmed on a phone at the back of a hall often has none, and automatic captions for Cantonese are patchier than for English, so the more local and informal the video, the less you get. A trailer with no dialogue has nothing to transcribe at all.
And it tells you about the film, not the screening. The subtitles on the night, the size of the house and the seat you end up in are a question about the venue.
Then pick the cinema
Festival films play at a handful of venues across the city, and they are not all equal. Look the venue up in every cinema in Hong Kong for its screens and formats, or browse by district if the deciding factor is getting there after work. For the regular releases showing at the same time, what is on this week lists them by how many cinemas carry each one.
Common questions
- Where can I find interviews with festival directors?
- Search the film's title with "Q&A", "interview" or "press conference" on YouTube. Festival and distributor channels are the most reliable, and the most likely to have captions.
- Can I get a transcript of any YouTube video?
- Only if the video has a caption track, uploaded or automatic. Videos with captions switched off, private videos and age-restricted ones cannot be transcribed this way.
- Are automatic captions accurate for Cantonese?
- Less so than for English. They tend to miss names, slang and fast conversation, so check anything important against the audio using the timestamps.