In May 1969, the first edition of the Quinzaine des Realisateurs - or the Directors' Fortnight in English - made its bow at Cannes, its mission being to provide a platform for "new voices, new cinemas" to receive the attention they deserve. Since then, independent festivals have emerged across the world with the same idea in mind - something even established A-list events have also tried to grapple with. As part of the New Waves, New Shores programme, the Fortnight's co-founder, former festival director and artistic director, Pierre-Henri Deleau and the chief executive officer of Taipei Golden Horse Executive Committee, Wen Tien-hsiang, will engage in an inter-generational, cross-cultural conversation with Hong Kong programmers Nose Chan, Didi Wu and Kiki Ho, with the aim of finding common ground and brighter futures for both filmmakers and cinephiles here and elsewhere.

For more details of Talk: Feasting on Futures – the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and the Celebration of New Cinemas: https://bit.ly/2wq2JJG 

Yov Moor will introduce the many concepts and functions of colour grading - how it can refine a film’s emotional texture and enhance its expression, what are the differences between grading commercial and arthouse films, how every stage of filmmaking affects colour grading, the differences of digital and celluloid grading, and other curious questions that you might have about colour grading!

About the speaker
Yov Moor, who has worked with both veteran and emerging directors, cinematographers and producers around the world on more than a hundred films of various genres including fiction and documentary films, will share his professional insight and experiences as a seasoned and well-travelled colourist. Recent films to his credit include Jinpa (directed by Pema Tseden, produced by Wong Kar-wai and Jacky Pang; nominated for Best Director at the Taipei Golden Horse and Asian Film Awards), Present.Perfect. (directed by Zhu Shengze; won Tiger Award at Rotterdam International Film Festival), Dead Souls (directed by Wang Bing; nominated for Golden Eye at the Cannes Film Festival) and The Road to Mandalay (directed by Midi Z.; won Best Film at the International Film Critics Week of the Venice Film Festival). His other past collaborators include Luc Besson, João Pedro Rodrigues, Lee Ping-bin, Tsai Ming-liang, Tran Anh Hung and others.

For more details of Masterclass on Colour Grading with Yov Moor with a Screening of Mustang:https://bit.ly/2wiNNgo 

Application Deadline: 19/5/2019 (Sun)

Period:
Workshop 1: 26/5/2019 (Sun) 2pm
Workshop 2: 8/6/2019 (Sat) 12noon
Workshop 3: 16/6/2019 (Sun) 7pm

Each session is around 4 hours.

Number of sessions: 3

Instructors: Clarence Tsui, Wen Tien-hsiang

Languages: Conducted in Cantonese and Mandarin (but is also open for English writers)

In parallel to the screenings, a series of workshops will be held with a view to facilitate the emergence of new film journalism and criticism in Hong Kong. Participants will meet with local and international film journalists and critics with a view of understanding more about their work, and also to receive feedback on articles they write based on the screenings and events in the New Waves, New Shores programme.

Website: https://bit.ly/30AnKiT
Details and Application Form Download: https://bit.ly/2VpBGMW
Enquiries: Tel - 2824 5309 / E-mail - rtam@hkac.org.hk

1. Arrivals and Departures

Barravento 
The Story of Woo Viet

2. Colossal Youth

Summer (L'Été)
Glass Tears

3. Gendered Realities

Binding Sentiments (Holdudvar)
Bends

4. Animated Dreams

Adam 2 and Scenes from Under Childhood (Section One)
Kongkee x Simon Liu

5. Mainstream Rebels

The Trip　
Everlasting Love

6. Against Camps

Duet for Cannibals (Duett för kannibaler)
House of the Lute

7. Mean Histories

Invasion (Invasión)
Trivisa 

8. Criminal Punishments

Death by Hanging
Somewhere Beyond the Mist

Cast: Antonio Pitanga, Luiza Maranhão, Lucy de Carvalho

Nomination
Nominated for Best Film, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 1962

Festivals
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1969
São Paulo International Film Festival 2016

Literally meaning "The Turning Wind", Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha's directorial debut unfolds more like a storm than merely a breeze. Revolving around a young man's return from the city to his village and his attempt to ferment a revolution among local fishermen against both their mystic beliefs and their exploitative masters, Barravento blazed a trail by documenting Brazil's class-driven and racial schisms up close, with Rocha appropriating European neo-realism (Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli being a key influence) to deliver sweeping vistas of Brazil's rural backwaters and its myriad contradictions and crisis. Made when Rocha was just 20, Barravento is now known as the film that kick-started Brazil's fiery, socially-conscious Cinema Novo movement.

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Cherie Chung, Lo Lieh, Cora Miao

Award
Best Screenplay, Hong Kong Film Awards 1982

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1982 

The Story of Woo Viet has long been one the more overlooked and under-screened films in Ann Hui's early output. Which is a shame: chronicling the passage of Vietnamese refugee Woo Viet (Chow Yun-fat) through a Hong Kong detention camp and his transformation into a ruthless contract killer in the Philippines, Hui's third feature mixes political commentary (with a screenplay by Alfred Cheung, with additions from Chiu Kang-chien) and sometimes staggeringly violent action-thriller tropes (including one of the bloodiest ways of using a toothbrush ever seen on screen). John Woo, for one, has been a vocal fan: Woo Viet's male bonding (between Chow and kung-fu star Lo Lieh) and Southeast Asian setting has certainly inspired what is to come in A Better Tomorrow and Bullet in the Head. 

Cast: Graziella Buci, Pierre-Henri Deleau

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1969 

What if idealists could no longer demand the impossible, and underneath the paving stones lie not the beach but, well, just more paving stones? The first film of Marcel Hanoun's "Seasons" cycle, Summer observes a young woman (Graziella Buci) as she holes herself up in a house in the country and struggles to articulate her despair over the disintegrating évènements on those burning Parisian boulevards in May 1968 - a spirit she hopes could return to her in the form of her activist boyfriend (Pierre-Henri Deleau). Hanoun himself has described Summer as the "most violent film ever made" about the May 68 uprising because of its calm and restraint: oozing regret and alienation at every turn, Summer is an understated precursor to films like The Mother and the Whore, The Devil Probably and Regular Lovers. Comrades: This is not a love story - or even a story at all.

Cast: Lo Lieh, Zeny Kwok, Chui Tien-you, Carrie Ng, Tats Lau

Award
Judges Special Prize in Young Fantastic Competition, Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2001

Nomination
Nominated for Best New Director and Best New Performer, Hong Kong Film Awards 2002

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2001

Well before the concept of "millennials" caught on in Hong Kong's social narrative, Lai Miu-suet managed to flirt with the aimlessness of turn-of-the-century youth in Glass Tears. Having converted from a career in marketing to filmmaking, Lai's directorial debut revolves around a retired mainland cop (Lo Lieh) who ventures into foreign territory - that is, Hong Kong - in order to look for her missing granddaughter. Such noir-ish beginnings soon give way, however, as the old man strikes up a friendship with a teenager (Zeny Kwok) who, as she claims, is willing to help in his mission so as to collect a debt from his granddaughter. A sturdy, sensationalism-free study of post-adolescent ennui in the freshly post-handover Hong Kong - when both people and their city seem trapped in some kind of in-between space - Glass Tears marks the arrival of a promising talent (both in terms of director and her cast) and the departure of a veteran (this is Lo's last film before he passed away in 2002).

Cast: Mari Törőcsik, Kati Kovács, Lajos Balázsovits, Gáspár Jancsó

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1969 

A woman struggles to liberate herself from the looming shadows of the men around her - this succinct strapline of Binding Sentiments is at once also a summary of what its director, Márta Mészaros, must have felt when she made what was to be her sophomore effort in 1969. On screen, Edit (Mari Törőcsik) tries to shake off the shackles of her recently deceased economist-turned-party-functionary by ridding herself of his possessions, pension and personal memories, much to the chagrin of his budding-tyrant of a son. Off screen, the Moscow-educated Mészaros, despite being the first woman ever to make a feature film in Hungary, has always seen her work obscured by the widescreen historical epics of his then husband Miklós Jancsó. But Mészaros's more intimate dramas, embodied perfectly by the rarely-seen Binding Sentiments, offers a more humanistic look into the moral dilemmas in a society where women remain bound by very gendered social norms.

Cast: Carina Lau, Chen Kun, Tian Yuan

Award
Best Actress, Osaka Asian Film Festival 2014

Festival
Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2013

With Bends, Flora Lau became one of the very few Hong Kong filmmakers to have premiered his feature-length debut at Cannes (in this case, the Un Certain Regard sidebar). Just as important to the film, however, is the subject of her film: in what has always been a masculine artistic realm, Lau chose to zero in on the psychological condition of a middle-aged woman, and how her predicament could serve as an allegory of Hong Kong's precarious position as a city on the verge of breakdown. Anna (Carina Lau), an affluent taitai, grapples with her new reality when her mundane but stable life disintegrates upon her husband's disappearance. Her attempts to stay afloat by trading in her (or strictly speaking, her husband's) stocks and antiques unfold in parallel to that of her mainland Chinese chauffeur (Chen Kun), who secretly sells off the spare parts of Anna's Mercedes (thus the pun of the film's title) so as to allow his wife to give birth to their second child in Hong Kong. Drenched in pathos and boasting camerawork by Christopher Doyle, Bends offers a delicate twist to what a "woman's film" could possibly mean.

Award
Best Animation Film, German Film Awards 1969

These days, Jan Lenica was perhaps best known for his film posters and, to a lesser extent, his production designs in theatre. There was a time, however, when he's a beacon of hope for Polish if not European animation cinema, with his mitteleuropa aesthetics leaving a distinct dent on filmmakers such as The Brothers Quay, and his magnum opus remains the much rarely aired Adam 2. A follow-up of sorts to his 1965 ten-minute short A - in which a man finds himself harassed at home by a human-size version of the capital letter in the title - Lenica's first feature-length animation is a jet-black collage of drawings and cut-outs which tracks a man's wordless passage through his absurd, purgatorial existence in an absurd, authoritarian world, one that resembles that as imagined by Franz Kafka or Eugène Ionseco (who collaborated with Lenica on his first short, Monsieur Tête, in 1959).

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1969

Designed as a "shattering of the myths of childhood" created by "sentimental" adults, American avant-gardist Stan Brakhage's 16mm short reveals the shock and awe of a disoriented infant as s/he makes her/his disoriented first steps into the human realm. Offering a transatlantic response to Jacques Lacan's "mirror stage" theories - the French psychoanalyst was a supporter of the May 1968 events, after all - Brakhage imagines a child's terror towards the world right from the womb, as represented by crimson flash frames. And then the warped visions of people, and finally juxtapositions of images of adult life and that of a child feeding a baby with a spoon - an induction of these young beings into a world of social relations. The more well-known chapter in a four-part series, Scenes from Under Childhood (Section One) is a vivid example of the ability of experimental cinema to broach a consciousness beyond popular understanding.

Award
Gold Mention, DigiCon6 Asia 2017

Dubbed "a love letter to our city and our future", Dragon’s Delusion is Hong Kong comics artist Kongkee's highly ambitious riff on Chinese history, cyborg theory and possibly quite a few things falling in between. Co-directed by Lee Kwok-wai and Tsui Ka-hei, these shorts - billed as the first two episodes of the Dragon’s Delusion feature film - are set in an alternative take of the 1960s when China is ruled by an emperor who has managed to stay alive and in power by finding an elixir for everlasting life. Rather than being some magic potion, however, the prescription actually turns out to be a fusion between man and machine - a dystopian plan some freethinking robots begin to question and struggle against. With his neon-colored palette and a story oozing desire and destruction, Kongkee and his crew produced a feverish nightmare which somehow resonates with the state we are living in.

Festival
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016

Festival
Wavelength, Toronto International Film Festival 2018

New York-based British-Chinese Simon Liu's metier lies in delirious assemblages of densely layered images which unfold like manic reveries of a perpetual traveller searching for his roots. Using only traditional film stock, Liu - who counts Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the late US experimentalist Paul Clipson and Native American filmmaker Sky Hopinka as sources of inspiration - delivers abstract yet highly dynamic pieces evoking urban landscapes which shaped and nurtured him. In Harbour City, two streams of flickering, superimposed images shot on defected 16mm stock unfold alongside each other, teasing strangely alienating and endearing sentiments out of these snapshots of the city. While there's only one single frame in Fallen Arches, Liu's latest piece filmed on 35mm film, the energy seems to be even more enhanced, as the filmmaker offers a machine-gun montage of his visual memories from Hong Kong, London and New York. Liu's films are as much about experimentalism as it is about an examination of the relationship between images and identities.

Cast: Peter Fonda, Susan Strasberg, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1969

What is better for programmers to make a stand against the conservative establishment by showing a psychedelic film maudit boasting sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, laced with a bit of critique against consumerisms of the day? Unfolding within one LSD-fuelled night in the life of a disillusioned television commercial director (Peter Fonda), Roger Corman's counterculture cult film pays homage to, among other things, Che Guevara and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (which the director actually helped distribute in the US). A wild race for the next high in strobe-lit bedrooms, on Los Angeles' dark streets, and across the Big Sur's dunes, The Trip epitomises the frenzy and paranoia of the tumultuous 1960s. Written by a very young Jack Nicholson and also starring Dennis Hopper - who actually premiered his Easy Rider the main competition in 1969 at Cannes - its inclusion in the Directors' Fortnight, is a harbinger of how popular culture could be appropriated and reinterpreted as auteurist art.

Nomination
Nominated for Best Screenplay, Hong Kong Film Awards 1985

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1984 

Nobody would expect an Andy Lau-starring romance drama to enjoy a day in the sun at Cannes. But that was exactly what happened in 1984, when Everlasting Love premiered at the Directors' Fortnight alongside, among others, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Stephen Frears' The Hit. Speaking about the film, director Michael Mak said he wanted to reflect Hong Kong "repressed and class-conscious society" with a love story between an escort, Pauline (Irene Wan), and young doctor Eric (Andy Lau). There's a certain truth in what he said, as Wan makes good of Mak's promise with an engaging turn as a nightclub-bound Cinderella trying and failing to fit into his boyfriend's upper-crust life. But the film also harks to the troubled-teen subgenre Mak's producer brother, Johnny Mak, has made his own with Lonely Fifteen (1982), with prison brawls and nightclub catfights galore.

Cast: Gösta Ekman, Adriana Asti, Lars Ekborg, Agneta Ekmanner

After years of regarding (and writing about) the pains of other filmmakers, US essayist-critic Susan Sontag finally jumped into the fold in 1969 by directing her first film in Sweden. Belying its title, Duet for Cannibals is actually a four-way amorous merry-go-round. Tomas (Gösta Ekman), a radical left-wing activist, begins his work as an assistant to a German professor, Bauer (Lars Ekborg), living in exile in Sweden. He is increasingly sucked into his employer's shady universe, a fall facilitated by the seductive charms of the academic's Italian wife (Adriana Asti, Before the Revolution). Complicating matters is Tomas' lover Ingrid (Agneta Ekmanner), who finds herself falling under Bauer's spell. A comical mix of conspiracies, carnal desire and crushed rebellions, the rarely-seen Duet is an intriguing example of a theorist articulating her views on art, cinema and politics on screen, all amidst the political upheavals and power dynamics of the revolution-heavy 1960s.

Cast: Simon Yam, Kwan Hoi-shan, Lok Bek-kay, Chan Lap-bun

Nomination
Nominated for Gold Hugo of Best Feature, Chicago International Film Festival 1979

Festivals
Edinburgh International Film Festival 1979
Toronto International Film Festival 1980

Relocating The Postman Always Rings Twice to a country mansion somewhere deep in the New Territories, US-educated Hong Kong film critic Lau Shing-hon's directorial debut is a dark fable wrought with a battle of the sexes, inter-generational conflict and class warfare. The seemingly tranquil life of a wheelchair-bound, middle-aged and lute-playing intellectual (Kwan Hoi-shan) and his ex-escort wife (Lok Bek-kay) is shattered when they recruit the virile Shek (Simon Yam) as their gardener. A raucous rebel without a cause, the young man seduces his mistress, challenges his master and eventually destroys all that stands before him, including himself - much to the secret glee of the other older, onlooking servants. Simmering with scenes oozing carnal desire and symbolism, House of the Lute is a visually audacious, sexually explicit outlier amidst the po-faced offerings emerging out of the Hong Kong New Wave.

"So many years on the eve of this happening. Now they are waiting to enter. This is the day." So says the old and stately Don Porfirio (Juan Carlos Paz) to his charges, members of a clandestine group trying to defend their city against a pending but unseen invasion. But who’s on the attack? In what ways? And for what? None of this is ever spelt out in Invasion. But that’s probably what makes Argentine filmmaker Hugo Santiago’s directorial debut - co-written by Jose Luis Borges - open for interpretation nearly four decades onwards from its release at home and at the Directors’ Fortnight in 1969. A cross between a modern-day Iliad (Buenos Aires dressed up as a metropolis called Aquilea), an existentialist tale (the fatalistic fighters know resistance is futile, but they carry on nevertheless) and a Melville-like noir (with its hushed, trenchcoat-wearing protagonists moving along mean urban streets), Invasion is a lost classic boasting bleak harbingers for the military dictatorships sweeping into power across Latin America in the 1970s - and also for people living in besieged cities in continents beyond.

Awards
Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Film Editing, Hong Kong Film Awards 2017
Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing, Golden Horse Awards 2016

Festival
International Forum of New Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival 2016 

Trivisa marks the beginning of the end, where shots in the past ricochet through time and eventually morph into rumbling thunder. Released just as Hong Kong was gearing up for the 20th anniversary of its return to Chinese rule, this Johnnie To and Yau Nai-hoi-produced crime thriller adapted the fall of three real-life felons around the handover to deliver an allegory of the city’s dwindling fortunes as the shadow of mainland China looms ever larger on the horizon. Kwai (Lam Ka Tung) is too overwhelmed by his greed to notice the audacity of his mainland sidekicks. A furious Yip (Richie Jen) returns to a life of crime after his plans to reinvent himself as a cross-border businessman is upended by corrupted Chinese cadres. A delusional Cheuk (Jordan Chan) gets his comeuppance when he tries to bite off more than he could chew in dealings on the mainland. Co-directed by rookie filmmakers Frank Hui, Jevons Au and Vicky Wong, Trivisa is a taut thriller and reflective political statement rolled into one.

Award
Best Screenplay, Kinema Junpo Awards 1969

Festival
Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 1969

In what is one of the most politically fiery outings in his long-running, maverick career, Nagisa Oshima transforms the real-life execution of a serial murderer into a damning critique of the racist undercurrents in Japanese society and how state-sanctioned violence helps in normalising and amplifying these sentiments. Sentenced to death for rape and murder, a Korean-Japanese man - known simply as R (Do - yun Yu) - somehow survives his hanging but loses his memory. Since the law prohibits the execution of convicts who couldn’t acknowledge their own crimes, the jailers begin an increasingly grotesque process of reenacting R’s life and deeds so as to remind him of what he did - which, in turn, actually reveals much more about their own murderous instincts and the state for whom they purportedly serve. Mixing Brechtian storytelling techniques and cinematic nods to Jean-Luc Godard’s politically-charged pre-Dziga Vertov features, Death by Hanging offers ominous and indicting commentary of Japanese society as the empty noose at its end.

Nominations
Nominated for Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress and Best New Performer, Hong Kong Film Awards 2018

Festival
New Currents Award Selections, Busan International Film Festival 2017

Somewhere Beyond the Mist begins with a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: "As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And so are we." Crime, then, is all about circumstance - something documentarian Cheung King-wai’s first fictional feature tries to elucidate through a teenager’s (Rachel Leung) self-confessed murder of her parents, a deadly deed driven by her discontent against the violence unfolding at home. Defying the norms as set by traditional Hong Kong whodunnits, somewhere constantly jolts the viewer from the film’s central criminal intrigue with the mundane daily existence of the pregnant policewoman (Stephy Tang) in charge of the case.