Museum of the Moving Image Hosts Series on Films from Hong Kong
This Friday, Hong Kong’s prolific movie director Patrick Lung Kong will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from another Asian director, Tsui Hark, at the Museum of the Moving Image. A true pioneer of Cantonese cinema, Kong wrote 14 films that he directed between 1966 and 1979 and starred in 60 films between 1958 and 2002. The museum…
This Friday, Hong Kong’s prolific movie director Patrick Lung Kong will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from another Asian director, Tsui Hark, at the Museum of the Moving Image. A true pioneer of Cantonese cinema, Kong wrote 14 films that he directed between 1966 and 1979 and starred in 60 films between 1958 and 2002. The museum will then screen The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (below), followed by a conversation with Kong and Hark, a native of Vietnam who remade this film. The event will kick off Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: The Cinema of Patrick Lung Kong, a nine-film series featuring rare titles imported from Hong Kong from August 15th through August 24th.
For more information, go to the jump page.
- Friday, August 15th, 7 pm, The Story of a Discharged Prisoner with Patrick Lung Kong and Tsui Hark in person. Kong’s breakthrough action-melodrama is the first Hong Kong film shot on-location in the slums. A prisoner is released after years of incarceration to find his family estranged and his ex-fiancée the mistress of powerful gang leader. In the rapidly modernizing streets, he tries to stay straight as he faces harassment from the violent gangsters and the hardened police.
- Saturday, August 16th, 3 pm, Teddy Girls with Kong in person. This thriller confronts themes of reform and revenge among disaffected youth. Josephine is sentenced to an all-girl reform school on Hong Kong’s periphery after a violent bar brawl. Along with a few accomplices, she escapes, only to find the streets are hostile, driving the girls to blood-soaked vengeance.
- Saturday, August 16th, 7 pm, A Better Tomorrow (above) with Kong and Hark in person. After a deal goes sour, a gang member is imprisoned and his best friend is crippled. Released from prison three years later, this hood reconnects with his injured buddy for some bloody score-settling.
- Sunday, August 17th, 3 pm, Hiroshima 28 with Kong in person. Filmed on the 28th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, this bittersweet melodrama tells the story of a young tour guide and a reporter researching the tragic effects of the atom bomb.
- Sunday, August 17th, 6 pm, Love Massacre with Kong in person. This highly stylized slasher-thriller is about a vivacious student whose boyfriend turns into a dangerous stalker after his sister’s suicide.
- Saturday, August 23rd, 2 pm, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. From a rat infestation in the slums, a fast-spreading virus grips Hong Kong, inducing panic when the government is slow to react.
- Saturday, August 23rd, 4 pm, The Window. Kong’s first color feature depicts the relationship between a career criminal and a blind girl while painting a portrait of marginalized life in Hong Kong.
- Sunday, August 24th, 3 pm, Pei Shih. This tale of heartbreak and doomed romance centers on two solipsistic characters described through an elliptical series of flashbacks.
- Sunday, August 24th, 6 pm, Mitra. The first Cantonese movie shot in Iran, this love story is set upon expansive desert backdrops.
Details: Screenings will take place in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Avenue in Astoria. Opening night is $15, but other screenings are included with admission.
Photos: Museum of the Moving Image
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