The night before my interview with him, Wong Kar-wai addressed a sold-out crowd assembled for a screening of one of his greatest films, 1994’s Chungking Express. Hawaii International Film Festival’s longtime director of programming, Anderson Le, affably overcame some introductory ribbing by Wong (“Anderson, why do you ask me that question! It was 25 years ago, and after 25 years, it’s still that same question!” he jokingly responded to the first, somewhat innocuous query), and coaxed out some remarkable storytelling and reminiscences from the director. “Every film [has] their luck,” Wong began. “Certain films, the process is really difficult: the […]
A debate over power napping (“Hong Kong people have never even heard of that!”) proved least of the memorable things covered by Wong Kar-wai during his appearances at this past winter’s Hawaii International Film Festiva Taking time off from introducing films, appearing at the festival’s gala, and touring the island with his wife (and celebrating her birthday), Wong was kind enough to sit down with Filmmaker one leisurely Friday afternoon, amidst the becalmed tropical surroundings of Waikiki’s Halekulani Hotel. Born in 1958 in Shanghai, Wong “was born in a generation where watching films was the main entertainment for kids. You could […]
Criterion has debuted a new video series, “Under the Influence,” in which, you guessed, directors talk the filmmakers who influence and inspire them. Opening the series is Moonlight director Barry Jenkins on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai. Specifically talking about Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, Jenkins hails Wong’s ability to do something “they tell you not to do in film school,” which is to “translate interiority for the screen.” Anyone seeing Jenkins’ Moonlight, winner of the last night’s Gotham Award for Best Picture, will recognize the influence of Wong on Jenkins’ own expressive depiction of internal emotions […]
It’s a rainy mid-day in late August — the wetness welcome, following an intolerably hot week, even by New York City summer standards. At night during that unpleasant spell the postmodern auteur Wong Kar-wai — the master of lush visuals and unpredictable soundtracks, the absolute perfectionist concerned with memory, loss, loneliness, and the subjectivity of time — had been shooting scenes downtown on the West Side of Manhattan, on SoHo’s funky Grand Street, for My Blueberry Nights, his first movie in English and the out-of-competition opening night presentation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (The Weinstein Company will release the […]
The 53rd annual edition of New Directors/New Films kicks off tonight and continues through April 14. Jointly presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New Directors showcases work from emerging filmmakers, largely culled from festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Locarno, Rotterdam and Sundance. The “New Directors” part of the name shouldn’t be taken too literally — in past years, selections were limited to first and second features, but that seems to no longer be the case: one director spotlighted below, Stephan Komanderev, is in his late 50s, with six features under his belt. […]
The prospect of creating personal AI avatars to comfort loved ones after death is the premise of Eternal You, a film by co-directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Below, co-editors Anne Juenemann and Lisa Zoe Geretschläger discuss how they divvied up the workload while being based between Berlin and Vienna, with Block and Riesewieck also splitting their time between the two cities. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What […]
Festivals have a baked-in tension between the works they’re meant to showcase—marginal relative to the marketplace, hence the (sometimes pejorative) descriptor “festival film”—and the sponsorships necessary for them to operate, the larger and more corporate the better. Cracks will inevitably emerge; thus, attending Locarno with his latest, The Old Oak, socialist Ken Loach spent part of his press conference dutifully denouncing sponsors UBS Bank, prompting two Swiss journalists sitting next to an attending friend to draw their breath sharply in protest: “UBS is an ethical bank.” Another tension is between the ideal of a “festival film”—work at the boundaries of what’s […]
A Hong Kong documentary crew travels to Borneo to dig up the grave of an ancient “evil dwarf sorcerer” for a mondo film on black magic; as you might imagine, protracted supernatural revenge is exacted for the next 70 minutes. This is the gist of Red Spell Spells Red (1983, d. Titus Ho), the second of two Hong Kong exploitation films written by Amy Chan Suet-Ming (the first being the previous year’s Centipede Horror, directed by Keith Li), of whom little is known beyond her proclivity for bug-based horror. Neither film is a major studio production, perhaps because Hong Kong’s […]
Fantasia International Film Festival announces today the third wave of titles for its 2023 lineup, with first and second wave titles revealed earlier this spring. The 27th edition of the festival will run from July 20 through August 9 at Montreal’s Concordia Hall Cinema, with additional screenings to be held at the J.A. DeSève Cinema, Cinémathèque québécoise, and Cinéma du Musée. Pre-sale tickets will be available on Saturday, July 15 at 1pm EST. In the meantime, check out the full list of additional titles, panels, events and jurors at this year’s Fantasia, and visit the festival’s official website for more […]
A lived-in, swooning memory piece on the intersection of roads taken and missed, Celine Song’s Past Lives is as confident as filmmaking debuts come. “I needed to invent the way that this movie should be made. I wanted it to be the first movie of its kind to be made,” Song tells me recently during an interview at the Madison Square Park—one of the locations of her film—over a picnic of petits fours and sparkling lemonade. “I think that every filmmaker pursues this when they approach a new project,” she continues. “I needed this to be something that stands on […]