Summer International Film Festival 2018
Included in the exciting lineup are It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi, Eddington by Ari Aster, and Ikeda Chihiro's Kowloon Generic Romance, alongside many other new films released in 2025 from France, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Australia, the US, and more. Late director David Lynch will also be honoured with a screening of Welcome to Lynchland by Stéphane Ghez, a documentary recording the auteur's artistic legacy.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Out
14 hours ago
- Time Out
Summer International Film Festival 2025 returns with more than 40 films
One of Hong Kong's most anticipated film festivals makes its return this month! From August 13 to 25, the Summer International Film Festival (Summer IFF) organised by the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) brings a diverse curation of more than 40 films to the city, from movies making their Asia premiere to beloved classics. Summer IFF 2025 is currently taking over five cinemas in town, including Emperor Cinemas iSquare in Tsim Sha Tsui, Premiere Elements and M+ Cinema in West Kowloon, the Louis Koo Cinema at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Wan Chai, and Emperor Cinemas Times Square in Causeway Bay, with ticket prices ranging from $100 to $75 available on Urbtix. Ari Aster's Eddington – starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Emma Stone – is poised to be one of the highlights of Summer IFF 2025 as it makes its gala premiere. Featuring black comedy and absurdist violence packaged as a neo-Western satire, the story follows the escalating conflict between a fictional New Mexico town's progressive mayor and its right-wing sheriff as their confrontation fuels a growing societal divide. Kowloon Generic Romance, a Japanese film directed by Ikeda Chihiro scheduled as the closing film of the festival, turns the Kowloon Walled City trope on its head, eschewing criminal underbelly for a quirky take on an office romance that sparks between two coworkers, played by Yoshioka Riho and Mizukami Koshi. In a tribute to director David Lynch, who tragically passed at the age of 78 earlier this year in January, Summer IFF 2025 will show the Asia premiere of Welcome to Lynchland by Stéphane Ghez, a documentary recording the auteur's artistic legacy and impact, with commentary from frequent collaborators and actors Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern. Summer IFF 2025 will also feature a selection of movies by the award-winning Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose influential art depicting contemporary life in Iran is at odds with the strict state censorship imposed by the country's regime. His debut feature film, The White Balloon, released in 1995, won the Cannes Camera d'Or, followed by The Mirror in 1997, honoured with the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival. Both films, and more, will be screened during this movie festival. Cinema heritage will also take up a prominent place at Summer IFF 2025 with a collection of restored classics, from the Anno Hideaki-directed Love & Pop and Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries, to Milos Forman's seminal One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest starring Jack Nicholson, Ernst Lubitsch's black-and-white One Hour With You, and more. Short films are set for a time to shine in the Nowness Shorts Selection, with five curated selections from China, Australia, and Japan earmarked for screenings. Unfortunately, the original event programming did not emerge completely unscathed. Family Matters – a Taiwanese film scheduled for screening at the festival on August 16 and 18 – has been pulled from Summer IFF 2025 at short notice for 'not meeting the revision requirements set by the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration (OFNAA)', HKIFFS shared in a Facebook post. Disappointing news for film lovers who wanted to see the drama directed by Pan Ke-yin, which was recently honoured with the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film at the 24th New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) in July!
Time Out
14 hours ago
- Time Out
Summer International Film Festival 2018
One of Hong Kong's most anticipated film festivals makes its return! From August 13-25, the Summer International Film Festival (Summer IFF) organised by the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) will bring a diverse curation of more than 40 films to the city across five cinemas, from movies making their Asia premiere to beloved classics. Included in the exciting lineup are It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi, Eddington by Ari Aster, and Ikeda Chihiro's Kowloon Generic Romance, alongside many other new films released in 2025 from France, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Australia, the US, and more. Late director David Lynch will also be honoured with a screening of Welcome to Lynchland by Stéphane Ghez, a documentary recording the auteur's artistic legacy.
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- The Herald Scotland
"Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing": The Mortician
Anyone doubting the vitality and importance of what we might call the cinema of opposition had only to glance at their news feed when the Academy Awards and the Palme d'Or were handed out. In March, a documentary about life under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank won the Oscar for Best Documentary, while in May veteran Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi won big at Cannes with the regime-baiting It Was Just An Accident. Over the decades Panahi has regularly been imprisoned and harassed, though he continues undeterred. During one bout of house arrest he shot a documentary and smuggled it to Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake. True to form, It Was Just An Accident was shot in Iran in secret and without permissions. His travails put funding rejections from Screen Scotland into perspective. Happily, this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is platforming similarly challenging works. There's a screening of Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk, Sepideh Farsi's documentary about 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, killed along with 10 relatives in an Israeli airstrike in April. Meanwhile, in the EIFF's competition strand, there's a welcome return for Canada-based Iranian exile Abdolreza Kahani, whose film A Shrine screened at last year's festival where it drew much praise. Filmed and set mostly in a bleak, snow-bound Montreal but with all dialogue in Persian, The Mortician follows Iranian expat Mojtaba (Nima Sadr) in his job washing the bodies of the deceased in accordance with Islamic tradition. It seems to be a semi-official sinecure, paid for by the Iranian state from an near-empty office run by a stern official with a military bearing. Mojtaba, in contrast, is saggy, baggy and looks eternally perplexed, shuffling from job to job to make the money he sends home to help his eight siblings and their disabled father. Most clients are dead, obviously, though not all. One wants to be washed alive – he thinks it will cure his insomnia – but finds the process too ticklish. Another, a woman, wants her party-loving daughter to practice so she can wash her grandmother when she dies and by doing so absorb some of the old woman's virtue. Read More And then there's Jana (Gola, an Iran-born singer and actress now based in London). An exiled singer of protest songs which are fiercely critical of the Iranian regime, she contacts Mojtaba with a most curious request. It takes him into her secluded rural home and into her life, and sees him partner her in a dangerous project. 'How many more songs are needed for change?' she asks him. 'Something bigger has to happen.' In a sense, The Mortician is a portrait of a diaspora, but one in which paranoia runs deep. Nobody trusts anybody Jana most of all. 'Delete all your apps,' she tells Mojtaba before his first visit. Elsewhere Kahani turns that feeling into visual motifs: misted-up windows and mirrors, reflections, close-ups of smartphone screens. These all hint at surveillance and scrutiny. As we will learn, the suspicions are not misplaced. Virtually all the music is diagetic – there is no soundtrack – and Kahani's style is avowedly, almost religiously naturalistic, all of which adds oomph to the film's abrupt, shocking ending. That feeling is rendered even more powerful by what follows: a coup de théâtre the director unveils just when you expect the credits to roll. Uh-uh, he says, instead delivering a sort of written manifesto in which he thanks himself for refusing funding from the Iranian state and explains how he shot the film entirely alone, on a smartphone, in an urgent need to make what he calls 'solo cinema'. 'If I have a phone and a mic, I'm ready,' he states. And how. Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing, The Mortician is a bold call to arms from a film-maker who is as defiant as he is resourceful. The Mortician screens as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 17-18
