Tony Leung Named Jury President at Tokyo Film Festival

Abid Rahman
·2 min read
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Tony Leung will serve as the president of the international competition jury at the 37th Tokyo International Film Festival, organizers announced on Friday.

The Hong Kong acting icon, who gave a masterclass at the festival last year, will return to Tokyo to head up a jury that will be announced at a later date. Leung has a long history with Tokyo Film Festival and had attended the event for the screening of his 2013 film The Grandmaster.

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Leung is widely considered one of the greatest actors Asia has produced. Best known globally for his work with Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, the pair have worked on seven films together — Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1994), Ashes of Time (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), 2046 (2004), and The Grandmaster (2013). Leung has also starred in three films — A City of Sadness (1989), Cyclo (1995) and Lust, Caution (2007) — that have won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival and in 2023 he was awarded Venice’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

“We are very pleased and deeply honored that Mr. Tony Leung will be serving as Jury President for the International Competition at a time when TIFF is enhancing its presence as a leading film festival in Asia,” Ando Hiroyasu, chairman of Tokyo Film Festival, said in a statement. “Mr. Leung, who has an illustrious career as one of the world’s most critically lauded and internationally admired Asian actors, has participated in TIFF several times in the past and has many fans in Japan.”

“I am immensely honoured to be on the jury team at TIFF this year. Japan is close to my heart in more ways than one and to be involved in celebrating film in this way, is a big deal for me,” Leung said in a statement. “From the age of 12, growing up in Hong Kong, I remember going to see all the classic Japanese movies from that time. These exciting trips to the cinema were the start of a great love affair between Japanese film, people and its culture for me, that has just grown and grown. I’m already expecting the festival to be full of surprises and a lot of fun to preside over, I’m sure. What I hope is that it will be a bit of an adventure, with an audacious line-up of quality films. I just, ‘feel’, when it comes to judging, trusting fellow jurors’ feelings as well as my own, will make a positive contribution to the selection process.”

The 2024 Tokyo Film Festival runs Oct. 28 through Nov. 6.

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