Melbourne International Film Festival celebrates movie about DVD piracy

Meet the Australian director of King of Peking

A movie about film piracy is in the limelight at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival.

When Australian director Sam Voutas saw pirated copies of his first Chinese feature film Red Light Revolution on the streets of Beijing, he used the experience as a source of inspiration for his newest venture.

“We found out about a week after it was released in the UK, the movie was available on pirated versions in Beijing on the streets,” Voutas said.

“I thought maybe rather than get angry, use this as an inspiration to tell a story about a father and son piracy team.”

This resulted in King of Peking, which is set in 1998 and tells the story of film projectionist Big Wong, who fears losing custody of his son Little Wong while his ex-wife is demanding spousal support.

“The film’s about a movie projectionist who basically pirates movies in order to pay his spousal support payments to his ex-wife,” Voutas said.

To make some extra dough he embarks on a DVD pirating scam and as his business begins to boom, the pressures ramp up in equal measure.

“So it’s about a man who makes a very bad decision, but for the right reasons,” Voutas said.

“It’s ultimately a father-son story set in the 1990s when cinema was changing in China, when DVDs were entering the market, which was changing the way people were watching movies.”

The Beijing drifter from Australia

Voutas moved to Beijing in 1986 with his parents for a three-year stay, followed by a longer residency in 1991.

After completing high school in China, he came back to Australia to study the art of film making at Victoria College of the Arts.

Voutas decided to go to back to China to develop his career in the Chinese film industry upon graduating, but even after living in the country for many years still struggled with the language.

“I was never a very good Chinese language student,” he said.

“I didn’t like homework, didn’t like memorisation.”

In order to get a better grasp of the language he hired a Mandarin tutor, who he would meet in a coffee shop and casually chat with.

“I bring a notebook and I just write down the words I didn’t know. That’s basically the approach I took to learning Chinese, which is a much more down to Earth, conversational technique,” he said.

The rise of Chinese cinema

Having lived in Beijing for more than a decade, Voutas was lucky enough to experience the development of the contemporary Chinese film industry.

During that period, Hong Kong and Taiwan films were on videotapes, making ‘video rooms’ boom nationally.

When Voutas moved back to China in the mid-90s, he found the video rooms had disappeared, and had been replaced by DVDs, home theatres and large-screen TVs.

“The arrival of the internet era made China and Australia closer than ever. Now you can see Chinese [new release]movies in Australian cinemas without waiting until you go to China during the Chinese New Year,” Voutas said.

In recent years, the two film industries have collaborated closely.

“I hope more Australian films can be shot in China in the future.”