DEVELOPMENT HELL (Hong Kong, 2010)
Directed by: Hiroshi Fukazawa
If you thought BODYGUARDS & ASSASSINS was epic, the story of how it got made will drop you to the floor. One of Hong Kong’s most legendary “cursed” productions, it was first shot by Peter Chan’s dad back in the 60’s, but a dispute with the distributor kept it off the market. Peter Chan was going to shoot a remake of his father’s film in the 90’s, but it never came together. Then Teddy Chen decided to make it in 2000. Over the next ten years the project had three start dates and was even cast and had sets built, but financial disasters, suicides and deaths kept cutting its legs out from under it.

DEVELOPMENT HELL tells the story of Peter Chan and Teddy Chen’s struggle to get their super-expensive, all-star project on the big screen. Originally conceived as a four minute souvenir film for the cast and crew of DARK OCTOBER (one of the earlier aborted incarnations of BODYGUARDS & ASSASSINS), director Hiroshi Fukazawa kept expanding his documentary as more and more people stepped forward to tell their story and as the film kept getting greenlit, then falling apart, then getting greenlit again. The result is an urgent, in-depth look at the current state of the Hong Kong and Chinese film industry and the psychology of a bunch of moviemakers who kept this project alive even as it burned down around them over and over again. And just as you’d expect from a cursed film, director Fukazawa was run over by a car and hospitalized for a mysterious lung condition during the making of his documentary. NOTE: Any injuries sustained by the audience during or immediately after the screening of DEVELOPMENT HELL are not the responsibility of the New York Asian Film Festival.