The Works：HK Indepedent Film Festival 2018, artist Lu Song & in the studio: piano & clarinet duo fro

The Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice Awards, and – coming soon – the Oscars. It’s definitely movie award season in the United States. Local cinemas are currently showing some of the Oscar-nominated films if you want to catch up. But if your taste runs more to regional independent productions, you might want to turn your attention to the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival, which is running until Sunday and is featuring more than 20 films from Hong Kong, Japan and Cambodia.
After graduating from the Wimbledon College of Art in London in 2006, Lu Song returned to Beijing where he now lives and paints idealised landscapes strongly influenced by the work of German Romantic painters. At the Massimo De Carlo Hong Kong gallery until mid-March, the exhibition “Combe” features a series of paintings that highlight green leaves, glimpses of jungle foliage, water and flowers, not real landscapes but imaginary scenes from daydreams.
According to cellist Wong Ka-lap, a founder member of the chamber ensemble The Timecrafters, the idea for the name came from the fact that Hongkongers lead such hectic lives. Because of that, he believes, the group should make any time people spend listening to them time well spent, and the performers – naturally - have a duty to craft the best musical experience they can. The ensemble wants to inject new life into the classical repertoire and they’ll be doing that during the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Two of its members are with us right now: pianist Rod Yu and clarinetist Linus Fung.