This year’s Cine Fan Summer International Film Festival 2017 (SummerIFF17) programme has been released. Opening a festival that will showcase 33 films next month is the world premiere of Wilson Yip’s new film Paradox.
Paradox, the third in Yip’s popular SPL action drama series, stars Louis Koo as a police negotiator searching for his abducted daughter in Bangkok. With action choreography by Sammo Hung, the film should have some dynamic martial arts scenes featuring Tony Jaa.
Closing the festival is 24 Frames, the posthumous final work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which intriguingly gives life to still images in a collection of 24 short four-and-a-half minutes film.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
One of the founders of the new wave of Iranian cinema, director Mohsen Makhmalbaf will visit Hong Kong for the screening of his controversial 1990 critique of Iranian society The Nights of Zayandeh-rood, which was not officially screened in Iran for 26 years after it’s release. He will also present Salaam Cinema, a documentary about the casting and screen tests of would-be actors who respond to a casting call advert for a new film. The director will meet the audience after the screenings.
Festival Films
Roy Szeto’comedy-drama Shed Skin Papa, stars Francis Ng as a dementia-ridden father who regains his youth, and explores themes of rebirth and reconciliation through a father-son relationship.
Deadpan comedy master Aki Kaurismaki’s The Other Side of Hope is a refugee story intertwined with absurdity that took home the Berlinale Best Director Award.
The festival also features three competition films from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Korean director Hong Sang-soo had the rare distinction of having two films selected for Cannes, including The Day After, his adept play about infidelity and mistaken identity. Academy-Award-winning director Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) pays a stylistic homage to the great maestroJean-Luc Godard in Redoubtable. In the Safdie Brothers’ heist thriller Good Time, Robert Pattinson hits a career high playing a scuzzy bank robber.
Great actresses can illuminate a film with their performances. Isabelle Huppert is back in Hong Sang-soo’s orbit to play “a tourist in Cannes” in Claire’s Camera, partnering with Berlinale Best Actress Kim Min-hee. The chameleonic Cate Blanchett plays 13 wildly different characters in Manifesto, bringing fresh possibilities to ideas that rock the world. Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie Colossal sees Anne Hathaway give one of her her fiercest performances as a killer kaiju.
From legendary rockers to promising outfits, films about musicians can be very hit or miss. Music fan Jim Jarmusch traces the destruction and survival of iconic rock star Iggy Pop and the Stooges in Gimme Danger. While Michael Wintervottom’s On the Road follows British neo-grunge outfit Wolf Alice during its UK-Ireland tour, intertwined with a fictional love story. Liberation Day is perhaps the most interesting film of the three chronicling as it does ex-Yugoslavian art-metal band Laibach as they become the first foreign rock band to tour North Korea.
Kings of Comedy – The Art of the Comedians
Is a series of six films where comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Jerry Lewis showcase the serious art of being funny in The Freshman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., City Lights, A Night at the Opera, Some Like it Hot and The Nutty Professor.
Monty Python’s surreal comedies are both popular and cult favourites but it’s been a long time since they were on the big screen in Hong Kong. Their influence on the style of modern comedy is profound, so take a seat and enjoy Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life on the big screen again.
Also returning to local screens are two droll masterpieces from two of America’s best directors. Woody Allem’s Love and Death explores life with a playful touch of Russian philosophy, while Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, featuring Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis helped create the current vogue of “anti-comedy.”
Local Classics Restored
Two local classics, Derek Yee’s C’est la Vie, Mon Cheri and Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s Comrades, Almost a Love Story seem to have taken on extra meaning when seen today.
The Cine Fan Summer International Film Festival runs from 15-29 August, tickets are only $28 and you can find the full list of films and screening schedule here http://cinefan.com.hk
Cine Fan Summer International Film Festival
Date: 15-29 August, 2017
Venue: Various
Tickets: various