Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke appears at an online show hosted by Hong Kong’s Broadway Cinematheque where film personalities shared what they had been missing during the lockdown. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Wong says such has been the interest in the videos that HKIFF is now looking to have them all subtitled so as to reach as wide an international audience as possible.

As with film festivals across the world, HKIFF has also been exploring and promoting its non-traditional platforms as it seeks to keep film fans engaged across a period of time where, under normal circumstances, there would have been hundreds of screenings from their assorted programs going on all over town. Instead festival organizers have been stuck in their office, with plans for staging some version of the event over the summer currently being formulated.

"In some ways COVID-19 has forced some organizations to share more content with people who might not even come to festivals," says Wong.