Word: asia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...enough to secure funding from elsewhere - Yu Lik-wai's Venice competition entry Plastic City has partners in Hong Kong, Brazil, Japan, France and China - the choice facing most directors is stark. "You either do very low-budget films for the local market, or some side markets like Southeast Asia, or you do really huge, huge-budget films as a co-production with China," says Lau. Medium-sized productions are few, meaning that up-and-coming directors are finding it hard to make the transition to mainstream features. Occasionally, established filmmakers will nurture prot...
...sense of the competition facing industry entrants, one only needs to compare this level of financing to that of the Chinese-language film dominating the city's movie houses this season - John Woo's Chinese historical drama Red Cliff, which with its estimated $80 million budget is Asia's most expensive movie to date. The trend for increasingly expensive epics will eventually lose steam, of course. But nobody is sure that Hong Kong's film industry will be ready with a replacement when it does...
Piracy declined in subsequent centuries, thanks to increasingly vigilant militaries and the development of the steam engine. But amid a drop in naval patrols and a boom in international trade following the end of the cold war, it has flourished anew--particularly in narrow choke points such as Asia's Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden, which links the Red and Arabian seas. Buoyed by fast boats, fearsome weaponry and high-tech communications gear, pirates carried off 263 reported heists in 2007--28% of which occurred in the lawless waters off Nigeria and Somalia. With its vast coastline...
...moment when the two firms appeared in imminent danger of failure. But he saw far more dire potential consequences than in the case of Bear. "Their securities move like water among all of the financial institutions," he says of Fannie and Freddie. If holders ranging from central banks in Asia to community banks in Iowa had lost confidence, the ensuing sell-off might have been catastrophic...
...organization in Pakistan rivals the influence of the ISI, according to analysts. Lieut. General Hameed Gul, a former director-general of the agency, describes it as a "highly professional and disciplined institution." Ali Dayan Hasan, South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, alleges that "the Pakistan army, through its intelligence agencies, is the principal abuser of human rights in Pakistan." And there is evidence in support of both claims...