Cinema from Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a place of longing, a high-speed city of a thousand different faces and huge contrasts, of rapid development and turbulent history. The cinema of Hong Kong reflects the energetic, visual, cultural, political and commercial potential of this unique metropolis like no other medium and has been a talking point for decades as the largest film industry in the region. It is here that adventurous auteur films stand alongside thrillers, costume dramas, martial arts epics and gangster films, all of which breathe new life into international genre cinema in the process, a place where cinematic extravaganzas with a keen disregard for convention rub shoulders with raw independent debuts. Here in Germany however, it is hardly possible to follow contemporary Hong Kong cinema on the big screen outside of festival screenings, to say nothing of its film history. We are thus all the happier to able to present five new productions from Hong Kong, including films by Johnnie To and Dante Lam, as well as one of the great classics of Hong Kong cinema, the 2002/3 Infernal Affairs trilogy, in collaboration with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office and with the support of the Hong Kong International Film Festival.