Cine Fan pays tribute to two legendary filmmaking partnerships - Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and the husband-and-wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet - in its upcoming September/October edition as it continues the exciting momentum of the Summer International Film Festival. 

Powell and Pressburger's daringly subversive, aesthetically inventive and ravishingly beautiful body of work will highlight a ten-film retrospective titled The Perfect Duo - The Films of Powell and Pressburger.  Starting with their first collaboration in the wartime drama The Spy in Black, the programme showcases the British native Powell's dynamic direction allied with Hungarian émigré Pressburger's richly layered and incisive screenplays, leaving an enduring legacy in British film history.

Through their own production company, The Archers, the two visionaries have produced a tour de force of whimsical fantasy - evoking a paean to friendship in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, validating the transcendent value of love in A Matter of Life and Death, unveiling repressed desires in Black Narcissus, ruminating the pursuit of art in The Red Shoes, and merging theatrical illusion with cinematic wizardry in The Tales of Hoffmann.  Their unbridled imagination combines with visual splendour powered by awe-inspiring special effects and vibrant Technicolor to create a universe of cinematic inventiveness that never existed before.

The motif of gaze, a thematic consistency with Powell's work, can be traced back to his early work, The Thief of Bagdad.  It has its ultimate expression in Peeping Tom, a controversial work about overtly voyeuristic sadism that acquired a cult following.

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: A Poetic Political Engagement celebrates the distinctive works of the French couple, acclaimed for their truly singular cinematic language and uncompromising quest for excellence that foreruns the New German Cinema in the 1960s.  Their films stare at, and listen intensely to, the disorienting yet overwhelming world and its people through literature, music and history, underpinned with political thoughts.  This nine-film programme features Machorka-Muff, their first collaboration; The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, named No. 1 in Cahiers du Cinéma's Top Ten of the year; Class Relations, receiving an honourable mention at Berlinale; and the tragicomic and lyrical masterwork, Sicilia!  Portuguese master filmmaker Pedro Costa's documentary Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? ventures into their editing suite, offering a glimpse of their creative process and loving relationship.

Cine Fan welcomes back two all-time French favourites, recently returned to their full glory through restoration.  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg will have its Asian premiere of the brand new 4K version, bringing to life the angelical beauty of Catherine Deneuve and the gorgeous kaleidoscopic colours of Jacques Demy.  In contrast, the implacably grave coolness of Alain Delon and the monochromatic aesthetic of Jean-Pierre Melville is vividly resuscitated in Le Samouraï.

For those who adore the taste of cult, John Carpenter's two sci-fi horror classics round out this Cine Fan edition.  The Thing, about a parasitic alien infiltrating and imitating earthly lifeforms, and They Live, about skeletal aliens subverting human lives, are compelling thrillers that allow us to see the material force of ideology.

For the complete programme and schedule of Cine Fan's September/October edition, please visit the official website at https://cinefan.hkiff.org.hk/en.   Tickets for all screenings will be available at URBTIX outlets starting from 23 August.