Eighteen years after beginning his prostitute trilogy with Durian Durian and Hollywood Hong Kong, director Fruit Chan returns to his indie cinema roots as a cinematic provocateur with this erotically charged drama. In her boldest performance yet, Chloe Maayan stars as a woman who lives on the sea with her three husbands. With an overactive libido, she heartily devotes herself to her work as a prostitute. As in the trilogy’s two previous films, Chan uses the world’s oldest profession to satirise the state of contemporary Hong Kong.

Deliveryman Jongsu is out on a job when he runs into Haemi, a girl who once lived in his neighborhood. She asks if he’d mind looking after her cat while she’s away on a trip to Africa. On her return she introduces to Jongsu an enigmatic young man named Ben, who she met during her trip. And one day Ben tells Jongsu about his most unusual hobby…

After his 2012 film When Night Falls ran afoul of authorities, Ying Liang was forced to resettle from the mainland to Hong Kong. The exiled dissident filmmaker distills the complicated feelings of trauma, anger, sorrow, displacement, frustration and resignation into A Family Tour and a protagonist whose pain and experiences mirror his own. When Yang Shu is invited to a Taiwan film festival, she grabs the chance to see her mother again. Her supportive husband, a Hong Kong native, arranges for her mom to travel from Sichuan to Taipei on a strictly monitored sightseeing tour. While tagging along the loud tour, the family quietly reunites for a short and most likely last time.

In Japanese with Cantonese Translation.

After his 2012 film When Night Falls ran afoul of authorities, Ying Liang was forced to resettle from the mainland to Hong Kong. The exiled dissident filmmaker distills the complicated feelings of trauma, anger, sorrow, displacement, frustration and resignation into A Family Tour and a protagonist whose pain and experiences mirror his own. When Yang Shu is invited to a Taiwan film festival, she grabs the chance to see her mother again. Her supportive husband, a Hong Kong native, arranges for her mom to travel from Sichuan to Taipei on a strictly monitored sightseeing tour. While tagging along the loud tour, the family quietly reunites for a short and most likely last time.

This special Cha Reading Series event features five academics from different universities in Hong Kong to share and discuss their vision of how their research and teaching have an impact on our community, and the challenges and difficulties they face, as well as their rewarding experiences. This will be a two-hour long informal discussion and reading, which is open to the public. Each speaker will talk about their own experiences for 10-12 mins, followed by a moderated discussion, a reading, and a Q&A.

After his 2012 film When Night Falls ran afoul of authorities, Ying Liang was forced to resettle from the mainland to Hong Kong. The exiled dissident filmmaker distills the complicated feelings of trauma, anger, sorrow, displacement, frustration and resignation into A Family Tour and a protagonist whose pain and experiences mirror his own. When Yang Shu is invited to a Taiwan film festival, she grabs the chance to see her mother again. Her supportive husband, a Hong Kong native, arranges for her mom to travel from Sichuan to Taipei on a strictly monitored sightseeing tour. While tagging along the loud tour, the family quietly reunites for a short and most likely last time.

1975, during the Khmer Rouge revolution. Fighting for her own survival, Chou, a young
Cambodian mother, looks for her 4-year-old son who was taken away from her by the
regime.

寺山修司說：「我的職業就是寺山修司」，這就是他的人生。
他一生擁有多個身份，作為劇作家與導演，試圖打破螢幕、舞台和觀眾之間的隔閡，將舞
台元素帶進電影，終其一生的作品，大多圍繞幾個命題：「中心不在」、「時間」、「回
憶」，在大多導演都在追求電影拍出實感的時候，寺山修司更在乎戲劇性，不僅為映像帶
來更多可能性，也為往後的次文化及藝術著下了奇幻而重要的一筆。

推理小說分幾多派別？改編成為推理電影又有幾多過程？比你想像複雜。推理小說家陳浩
基聯同《逆向誘拐》導演黃浩然將分享推理電影的創作過程和其引人入勝的地方。

一名瘋狂導演與可憐的劇組們，正在山中的一座廢墟中拍攝一部低成本的殭屍電影。追求
逼真效果的導演，怎麼拍都不滿意……沒想到真正的殭屍卻現身撲向劇組成員！在如此糟
糕的狀況中，導演卻認為這是意外的禮物，當劇組人員一個個變成殭屍時，導演決定要拍
出一部「37分鐘一鏡到底的殭屍生存戰」電影……

Is there a city or a place you have special connection to? Do you want to write a short
story about it? How do you set your work? What gives your reader the sense of being
there? We will look at techniques and examples – good and bad – that evoke and
capture a place and time. These techniques that can be applied to fiction, nonfiction,
memoir, and travel writing.

Please be prepared to write a short flash piece to be read in the workshop.

Only a democratic system is able to protect our freedom—but is this really the
case? Russell challenges our illusions about democracy and freedom by
painstakingly and repeatedly raising the questions: What is democracy? What is
freedom? Whose freedom and democracy? Who is controlling and who is being
controlled? Are we in the darkest times? Why are more and more elected political
representatives recklessly destroying our most cherished values? The film covers
events that occurred within 3 years, putting into a dialogue freedom fighters
from 5 regions, including student protestors from the Hong Kong Umbrella

Movement, comedians from Bollywood, a rapper from Tunisia, activists of the
Black Lives Matter movement, and supporters of the conservative stance. The way
the film strives to understand the rise of the Trump phenomenon and Illiberal
Democracy through a global lens is what makes it a truly exceptional piece of
work.

Conducted in Cantonese

In 1993, former military officer PARK Suk-young is recruited as a spy by South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS), and given the codename "Black Venus". He is then sent to infiltrate a group of high-ranking North Korean officials based in Beijing, with the ultimate goal of acquiring information on the North's nuclear program. After becoming close to Ri Myong-un, a key power broker, Black Venus succeeds beyond his wildest dreams of gaining the trust of North Korea’s leadership. But political machinations on both sides of the border threaten to derail his accomplishments.

Conducted in Cantonese.

Director｜John Schlesinger


Screenplay｜Waldo Salt


Cast｜Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight


1969/ Color/ 113 mins/ In English with English subtitles


One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

Conducted in Cantonese.

Conducted in Cantonese.

Conducted in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Conducted in Cantonese.

Conducted in Cantonese.

Conducted in Cantonese.

Conducted in Cantonese

The Color of Money

Director｜ Martin Scorsese

Screenplay｜Richard Price

Cast｜Tom Cruise、Paul Newman

1986/ Color / 119 mins / In English with English subtitles

In an Academy Award-winning performance, Paul Newman reprises his role from The Hustler as Fast Eddie Felson, 25 years later and retired. He takes a brash young talent under his wings, but egos clash and the men part ways. Ultimately, Felson is lured back to confront his protégé and the demons that have long haunted him.

Screenwriter and playwright Farmer Hong, who has received Taipei Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film Award for Best Screenplay for Trivisa, and Hong Kong Drama Award for Best Play for The Abandoned Harbour, will share his experience in writing for screen, TV and stage.

Our first screening of The Seventh Seal falls on the 100th birthday of Ingmar Bergman (14th July). Apart from showing this timeless classic, we are collaborating with CHAT to hold a special Pop-up event on 1/F of Broadway Cinematheque to commemorate the legendary filmmaker. Join us to embroider Bergman’s name or outline Death on your belongings, all you need is to bring your own tee, tote bag, or try to mend your own torn fabrics on the screening day. Tools and guides will be offered before and after the screening. Free of charge, seize the chance!

Synopsis

Following her award-winning documentary, One Tree Three Lives on the novelist Hualing Nieh Engle, Hong Kong director Angie Chen offers another lively portrait about the artist Yank Wong. A complex man who resists definition, Wong is a painter, art director, set designer, writer, musician, and photographer, a true renaissance man who expresses his creativity in multiple forms. More than a portrait of an artist and the creative life, the film is also a high-octane cat- and – mouse game between filmmaker and subject: one tries to capture, the other evades.

Synopsis

After one of their shoplifting sessions, Osamu and his son come across a little girl in the freezing cold. At first reluctant to shelter the girl, Osamu’s wife agrees to take care of her after learning of the hardships she faces. Although the family is poor, barely making enough money to survive through petty crime, they seem to live happily together until an unforeseen incident reveals hidden secrets, shaking the bonds that unite them… Winner of Cannes Palm d’OR, Kore-eda reaffirms himself as one of the world’s best auteurs with this heartbreaking drama about a different kind of crime family.

The Hustler
Director｜ Robert Rossen
Screenplay｜ Robert Rossen, Sidney Carroll
Cast｜ Paul Newman, George C. Scott
1961/ B&W / 134 mins / In English with English subtitles

Like Fast Eddie Felson, it seems that Robert Rossen’s journey to the depths of hell summoned all of his creative forces to align. Every element as precise and ambiguous as a physics puzzle, Rossen’s black-and-white Cinemascope screen mirrors the grungy, lonely glamour of the midwestern American pool halls where Fast Eddie displays as many confounding skills in his pool game as in his artful swindling. The scintillating performances of Paul Newman’s charming hustler, Piper Laurie’s troubled, perceptive Sarah and George C. Scott’s manipulative mastermind bounce off of one another in a high stakes game that aims beyond the shabby theatrics of the pool hall and into politics, filmmaking and the daily trafficking of the human spirit. The layers of masks and manipulation never fully peel away from the propaganda that all the “twisted, perverted, crippled” characters use to protect themselves and somehow “win.” Rossen’s search through night clubs, boxing rings, political parties and ancient Rome all seem to lead to Eddie’s chance to beat Minnesota Fats. At the end of a complex, tragic, gracefully executed game, exile may be the price of enlightenment.

Forty Guns
Dir: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Photography: Joseph F. Biroc
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck、Barry Sullivan

1957 / 80 min / B&W / In English with English subtitles

One of the great revisionist Westerns of all time, Forty Guns melds Greek myth and genre tropes into a stylistically audacious proto-feminist fairy tale built around the larger-than-life figure of Barbara Stanwyck’s “Woman with a Whip,” Jessica Drummond, a seductive and ruthlessly sensible tyrant who rules with unflinching authority over her vast Arizona cattle territory and faithful army of men. Drummond’s sole weakness and source of tragedy is her inability to control her feckless and violent younger brother, who wrecks havoc on the town of Tombstone and draws the wrath of Griff Bonnell, a legendary ex-gunslinger turned US Marshall in town on a mission with his two brothers. Fuller uses a glorious black-and-white widescreen canvas to etch a bold woodblock vision of the West, ignited by stylistic flourishes—extreme close-ups of eyes, shots down the barrel of a gun—that would be openly imitated by the likes of Sergio Leone and Seijun Suzuki, among the many auteurs influenced by Fuller’s visionary films.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY
Director｜William K. Howard
Screenplay｜Preston Sturges
Cinematographer｜James Wong Howe
Cast｜Spencer Tracy, Collen Moore

After the funeral service for Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy), a powerful and much-hated railroad tycoon who committed suicide, his best friend Henry (Ralph Morgan) recalls Garner’s life, his family problems, and his rise from track walker to president of the railroad. The Power and the Glory was loosely based by Sturges on the life of C. W. Post, his second wife’s grandfather, who founded the Postum Cereal Company, which later became General Foods.The film, told through flashbacks, was also cited by Pauline Kael in her essay “Raising Kane”, as a prototype for the narrative of Citizen Kane (1941).

In this Cha Reading Series event “Nostalgia in the Chinese City”, Cha contributors Antony Dapiran and Paul French will discuss nostalgia in their work and in the Chinese cities where they have lived and worked for many years. Moderated by Cha co-editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming.

Nostalgia—from the Greek words nostos (‘homecoming’) and algia (‘pain’ or ‘ache)—a yearning for lost time and place, for a past where one perhaps felt more ‘at home’. We may feel nostalgia for our own past, or for earlier times we could not have personally known. And it seems that nowhere is this more sharply felt than in the rapidly developing metropolises of China. Our cities are sites of collective memory, and collective amnesia. Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing: all suffer forms of the “culture of disappearance”; all have ambiguous—sometimes wistful, sometimes problematic—relationships with the past. Whether in a tourist packed hutong, an old Shanghai-themed café, a G.O.D. store, or gazing at a lone junk sailing on Victoria Harbour—we encounter nostalgia triggers daily. It can be comforting or confusing, positive or negative. It is political and it is personal. Nostalgia is a community, even if those communities are long gone now.