‘The Violin Case’: A Macau Film That Avoids the Casinos

On 15 May, just around cocktail hour, writer, director, producer and editor Max Bessmertny was the man of the hour. If he felt at all nervous while wending his way through the throng of guests clinking glasses in the W Macau’s Living Room lounge, Bessmertny didn’t show it. He and his guests were gathering ahead of the world premiere of his first feature film, The Violin Case (走失的小提琴), at Studio City Cinema, a labour of love six years in the making against considerable odds, chief among them Macau’s famously slight production landscape and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Violin Case’s do-it-yourself approach to financing, production and distribution comes at a time when more and more filmmakers are looking outside traditional film-business models, amid rising corporate consolidation — the proposed Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery is the most high-profile example — and pressure on artists to either work as hired guns or find other outlets for creativity. While films made through alternative processes are still the minority, stepping beyond the boundaries set by big producers is gaining traction. Benson Koo’s The Perks of Being Wild had plenty of exposure before it ever made it onto a conventional movie screen; the massive success of American indie Curry Barker’s subversive Obsession is among 2026’s biggest industry stories; and the word-of-mouth sensation that is Lan Hongchun’s Teochew romance Dear You caught everyone by surprise, especially when it earned well over 100 times its reported budget after a modest release expanded through word of mouth.

Kelsey Wilhelm as struggling artist Theo, wanders Macau overnight

“I’m so tired of these rejections from festivals,” says Bessmertny of The Violin Case’s long road to cinemas. “Why do I need to be anointed? I couldn’t care less. Festivals are helpful, but their models can be too rigid. I thought, ‘Let’s go, let’s release it.’ I don’t need anyone’s approval.” 

Macau producer Virginia Ho Hoi-Ian agrees. “We were tired of waiting and then getting told, ‘No. You’re not worthy. You’re not invited to the party,’” she says.

So Bessmertny didn’t wait. He started working on the script in 2020 and eventually completed it with input from Ho and writer Jorge Cordeiro dos Santos. Inspired by a real event involving his father, the action unfolds mostly over the course of one night, when a down-on-his-luck artist, Theo (Kelsey Wilhelm), loses a painted violin he has found a buyer for after leaving it in Ah Chong’s (Filipe Baptista Tou) taxi. As Theo bounces around Macau’s old town chasing the artwork, he dodges his dealer Pauline (Clara Brito), who wants her commission, an ex-girlfriend, Mel (Nicole Place) and his landlord Mimi (Joyce Tam), among others. With dialogue in English, Cantonese and Portuguese, there’s not a single casino visible in The Violin Case, which Bessmertny says was heavily influenced by Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, written by Joseph Minion, and other films about the opaque art business, like Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. 

“I wanted to stay away from that [casino] world. Imagine showing this film to friends in other parts of the world and showing them the real Macau. That’s where we wanted to bring them in,” says Bessmertny. 

“And it doesn’t fit with the story,” adds Ho. “I mean, he’s a struggling artist. What is he doing in a casino betting?”

An unusual route to Macau

Born in Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, Bessmertny grew up in an artistic household. His father, Konstantin, is an artist whose lost artwork — it disappeared in Hong Kong — inspired The Violin Case; his mother was a classical pianist. The family relocated to Macau after Konstantin became enamoured with the former Portuguese enclave when a gallery exhibition took him there. Max was four.

“My first memory is the train ride from Harbin to Guangzhou,” says Bessmertny, weeks after the Macau debut, now seated in his father’s stylish art studio in Chai Wan, Ho to his left. “Macau was incredible in the early 1990s, and at the time it was culture-driven and ahead of Hong Kong in terms of art. My father eventually made his way to Hong Kong, did some exhibitions and found a gallery to call home. He won some awards — one was the Philippe Charriol prize, given by Henry Steiner — so there was an intersection between Macau and Hong Kong.”

Bessmertny graduated from university with a philosophy degree and, perhaps unsurprisingly, found work in the AV sector in Macau’s casinos, though his film-nerd predilections never left him. Some of his training came simply from watching.

“I’d come home from the casino at night and always watch something — a movie that would help me wash the corporate off my hands. I always wanted to tell stories,” he says. Some nights David Fincher was on the menu; other nights it was a classic noir from the 1940s or something like Josef von Sternberg’s 1952 Macao. But Bessmertny also developed a curiosity about film language — what’s a match cut, what is a whip pan? — and though he’d started making shorts on his own with friends in the 2010s (Tricycle Thief from 2014, Dirty Laundry and The Handover, both in 2020), his whip pans were “obviously out of focus.” So he went back to school and earned a master’s degree in filmmaking from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

As director and producer for the casino’s visual communications, human resources training, video training and corporate campaigns, Bessmertny learnt the trade on the job. “I was the only guy in my department,” he recalls with a chuckle. “I wanted to learn from what other hotels did, so … I went over [to the Venetian] and visited. There was this lady who was like, ‘Why is this kid here? Why is he walking around the property, checking our equipment and asking for information?’ She was very suspicious.” He laughs again; that lady was Ho, also a casino refugee from Sands’ visual media office, who was thoroughly grounded in the practical logistics of production. A partnership was born.

Making a feature

It wasn’t an easy road, and circumstances threw up hurdles at every turn, starting with Bessmertny’s misguided belief that making a feature would be exactly like making a short. “I thought I could do something like [The Handover], which was just a few dollars and a few days,” he says with a shrug. “I had no idea what I was getting into. It was a whole other monster.” The first budget he shared with Ho was full of what she calls holes: items that had never occurred to him but could come back to haunt him, compounded by his impatience to get started.

“He was rushing; he wanted to make the film now,” she recalls with a laugh. “But there was no money and not much going on during the pandemic and I was explaining this to him as nicely as I could, as diplomatically.” Eventually Ho convinced Bessmertny they should continue fine-tuning the script. Early funds were raised the old-fashioned way: by calling friends, family, their dentists, doctors and lawyers. A year later Konstantin created a new Napoleon series — which references the film — to finance post-production. The project later received promotional support from Macau’s Cultural Development Fund and in-kind support from Studio City and Melco for its theatrical release.

Nonetheless, the production faced Covid-19 disruptions and multiple collaborators dropping out. Ho and Bessmertny lost their cinematographer at one point, but fortunately emerging Hong Kong director of photography Ma Wing, who had worked as a gaffer on Hong Kong-shot features like Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction and Michael Mann’s Blackhat, was angling to expand his skill set. They tapped every contact they had, relied on Zoom casting for the non-professional cast and had to work around widespread closures. The film finally shot over 24 nights in 2022, with little room for error; they barely had hard drives large enough for storage. “We got lucky though,” says Ho. “We had no rain, no typhoons and no Covid outbreaks.”

The Violin Case is far from perfect. Some might argue that Theo is too unlikeable to be a lead. He’s entitled, arrogant and self-involved, a classic expat who complains when Mimi wants her rent and treats Mel like an ATM or hotel. But he does have an arc, and anyone who’s ever lived in the region will recognise the characters; the film also captures the essence of Macau, even on its Covid-bare streets. “Macau can be really absurd,” quips Bessmertny. “It’s great.” More than anything, the film shares a fundamental trait with Dear You and Obsession: authenticity.

“I believe that we need stories, that we need to be able to imagine. … Industries have been sticking with the formula to success — the Hollywood way of telling your story. He’s a great director but Johnnie To’s movies are always the same. I think audiences are tired and want something more,” argues Ho, citing Dear You’s uniqueness and its underlying veracity. “They want film to tell them something real.”

Bessmertny and Ho agree that whether mainstream film producers take the right lesson from the successes of films like Dear You and, in its limited run in Macau, The Violin Case, only time will tell. Following a private screening in India, the film is due to have its European premiere at Lisbon’s Museu do Oriente (Museum of the Orient) on 11 September. Hong Kong is, hopefully, next. For now the zeitgeist is on their side, and Bessmertny likens the current independent energy of filmmakers willing to go their own way to the great indie movements in the US, France and the UK of the 1970s, when audiences embraced original content. The question becomes one of how to sustain it.

“People’s ideas and tastes can change like that,” Bessmertny finishes with a snap. “This is the time to do this, to tell the original story, to play with genre, do different stuff — and do it outside the box as well.”

The Violin Case returns to Macau theatres for a limited release on September 18. Hong Kong dates are to be confirmed.