Tip of the HKIFF iceberg
With 232 films from 63 countries spread across 23 programs, the 43rd Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) should have something to please filmgoers of every stripe. Among the region’s — and the world’s — oldest film events held annually, HKIFF has had its share of setbacks as well as triumphs, including being among the first venues in the world to showcase the works of Ann Hui, Jia Zhangke, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Tsai Ming-liang, among others.
As usual the program encompasses animation, short films, documentaries, restored classics (like the complete, five-hour Bernardo Bertolucci masterpiece 1900), and the latest by the world’s auteurs. A few tweaks have refocused the spotlight on emerging filmmakers, both Chinese-language and from around the world, in the Firebird section. No HKIFF would be complete without some retrospectives, which this year feature homegrown favorite Sammo Hung — a towering figure in the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s — and trailblazing mainland actress Li Lihua.
Close to home, Finnish director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2) opens the festival with Bodies at Rest, a crowd-pleasing Hong KongChina thriller set on Christmas Eve in a Kwai Chung morgue. The film may not be the most original ever to grace festival screens, but it has more than a few clever moments, zips by in a flash and sets the tone for a welcoming and boisterous event to follow. On a more serious note, Xing Jian paints a portrait of powerlessness set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in Winter After Winter, where villager Lao Si obsesses over preserving the family legacy to the detriment of that same family. And New Wave/LGBTQ/indie icon Stanley Kwan returns to directing after a decade-long hiatus with First Night Nerves, starring Sammi Cheng and Gigi Leung as rival actors creating more drama backstage than on it in an All About Eve-style theater romp. It’s lush. It’s campy. It’s Kwan.
From farther afield comes the latest by the French enfant terrible François Ozon. By the Grace of God is an examination of the trauma of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic church on three men who decide to speak up and stop the abuse from continuing. The Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson taps his special effects masters to restore a series of archival films from WWI to create a new and enlightening narrative in the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Berlin’s Golden Bear winner Synonyms by Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid is simultaneously a political statement and social satire, and is arguably the most challenging film on the schedule this year. Quebecois auteur Denys Arcand completes the unofficial trilogy he started in The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions with The Fall of the American Empire. Sibel, from Turkish director Cagla Zencirci (with Guillaume Giovanetti), tackles gender roles in a poetic fairy tale anchored by a mute young woman who communicates by whistling.
Finally, HKIFF is a great time to catch up on the award winners you might have missed last month. Two of the finest are 2017’s best film Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins’ (Moonlight) If Beale Street Could Talk, costarring this year’s best supporting actress (Regina King), a shimmering, melancholy drama that’s as heartbreaking — a young couple is torn apart by a mistaken rape accusation compounded by racism — as it is heartwarming for the family’s solidarity and unconditional affection against the odds. And Free Solo is Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s chronicle of free climber Alex Honnold scaling the sheer face of Yosemite’s El Capitan. In two words: gloriously vertiginous. See it on a big screen.