‘Mad Fate’, ‘Elegies’ To Open Hong Kong International Film Festival

This year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) will open with two local films – Soi Cheang’s noir thriller Mad Fate and the world premiere of Ann Hui’s Elegies, a documentary about contemporary local poetry.

Mad Fate, starring Gordon Lam and Lokman Yeung, a member of hot boy band Mirror, recently had its world premiere at the Berlin film festival. Soi Cheang has also been chosen as the Filmmaker In Focus at this year’s HKIFF.

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The world premiere of Cheuk Wan-chi’s Vital Sign, starring starring Louis Koo, Yau Hawk-sau and Angela Yuen, will close the festival.

HKIFF, which runs for 12 days from March 30 to April 10, is returning to its usual spring dates after being postponed to August last year due to Hong Kong’s fifth and most serious wave of Covid.

Overseas filmmakers, including Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-Liang and Lee Kang-Sheng, will be returning to the festival to meet local audiences for the first time since 2019. While HKIFF managed to keep running as an in-person but scaled down event during the pandemic, Hong Kong’s strict quarantine rules mostly kept overseas visitors away.

In total, the festival’s program includes 320 in-theatre and online screenings of 200 films, including nine world premieres, six international premieres and 67 Asian premieres. Special sections include a programme of Nordic cinema and retrospectives of Jean-Luc Godard and Japanese filmmaker Itami Juzo.

Gala presentations include a restored version of Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982) and recent festival hits including Christian Petzold’s Afire, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Laura Poitras’ All The Beauty And The Bloodshed. Nomad will screen as part of a sidebar of restored Chinese classics, which also includes Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City Of Sadness and Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion.

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