Latest news with #WongKar-wai
The Star
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
Interview: Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi hints at future cooperation with Chinese actors, filmmakers
BUDAPEST, May 31 (Xinhua) -- Ildiko Enyedi, the celebrated Hungarian filmmaker and screenwriter known for her 2017 Golden Bear-winning film On Body and Soul, has shared her reflections on Chinese cinema, her encounters with renowned Chinese filmmakers, and her ongoing projects at a film forum in Budapest. "I would love to work with Tony Leung again. It was such a wonderful experience to work with him," Enyedi said in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the "Imazsia Chinese Film Week 2025" forum on Friday. Speaking about her latest film, Silent Friend, which is currently in post-production, Enyedi disclosed that the film, set in a botanical garden, explores themes of communication not only among humans but also between people and plants. The film features an international cast, including Chinese actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, whom Enyedi had envisioned for a specific role while writing the story even before receiving his confirmation. Fortunately, the script and her previous films convinced Leung to accept the role in the film. Enyedi described him as "an incredibly deep thinker, a deeply feeling human being, who approached the work with humility and openness." She added, "Working with him is a very special gift from life," and expressed her hope for future cooperation. The renowned director also spoke of her enduring fascination with Hong Kong cinema. "I watched Center Stage at the Berlinale in 1992, where I was serving on the jury at the time. It left such a profound impact on me that, many years later, I acquired a copy because I wanted to share with others," she recalled during a panel discussion at the film forum. She described the 1980s and 1990s as a golden era for Hong Kong films, which resonated deeply within Budapest's alternative cultural circles. She also praised acclaimed Chinese director Wong Kar-wai. "I believe all of Budapest eagerly awaited every new Wong Kar-wai film!" Recalling her first visit to Hong Kong in the 1990s, she mentioned the city's vibrant energy and cinematic legacy. "Hong Kong is definitely a special place for me." Enyedi's engagement with Chinese filmmakers has grown through participation in major industry events. In 2018, she served on the jury at the Shanghai International Film Festival, marking her first visit to mainland China. She remembered the passion of local filmmakers and audiences, who were eager to bring meaningful, smaller-budget films to wider audiences. In 2023, she returned to Shanghai to deliver a masterclass, where she appreciated the opportunity to discuss film-making in depth with a professional audience. "It is always much more interesting to hear about specific choices, challenges, and behind-the-scenes stories from fellow filmmakers, rather than just answering general questions," she said. Enyedi also expressed keen interest in Chinese contemporary art films. She mentioned Resurrection by Chinese director Bi Gan, which won a special award at this year's Cannes Film Festival. "I am very, very curious about this film," she said. Looking ahead, Enyedi expressed enthusiasm for continued collaborations with Chinese filmmakers and highlighted Hungary's growing reputation as a film production hub.
South China Morning Post
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
New York bar mixes cocktails and Chinese pop to give the music life beyond karaoke lounges
In New York's Long Island City neighbourhood there is a nondescript, white-tiled Taiwanese restaurant named Gulp. Advertisement Those not in the know might assume that the five counter seats are all there is to this little joint, but open the grey door at the rear, pull back the curtain behind it and you will find yourself in a softly lit cocktail bar imbued with warm, red tones reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai films. This is 929, a bar that pays tribute to 1980s and 1990s Cantonese and Mandarin pop culture and music, so named for its phonetic similarity to 'night to night' and because the numbers represent a New York telephone area code. Here the walls are covered in posters of Hong Kong singers – there is one of Faye Wong , another of Sammi Cheng Sau-man – and towards the back is a DJ set-up with dozens of Cantopop and Mandopop vinyl records and CDs. New York cocktail bar 929's walls are decorated with posters of various Cantopop singers, and the soft, red lighting is reminiscent of scenes in Wong Kar-wai films. Photo: 929 They are all from the personal collection of Chen Haoran, who founded 929 with architect Sean Yang and restaurateur Jeff Liu. Advertisement Chen Haoran, who is originally from Jiangmen in China's Guangdong province, recalls listening to his mother's favourite records as a child, which led him to amass his own collection of Cantopop and Mandopop albums, especially after moving to New York when he was 11.
New Indian Express
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Painter Varad Bang's homage to Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood for Love is a curation of heartbreak
Auteur Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is about a great love and a great loss. The couple in the film is a Mr Chow, a journalist with slicked-back hair and sad eyes, and Mrs Chan, a secretary in stylish and fitted cheongsam dresses. The two meet across a passageway in a cramped apartment building in British Hong Kong of the '60s the day they both happen to move in; they eventually get curious about each other – something that is helped by the constant absence of their respective spouses. With time, they realise that their partners are having an affair – Mrs Chow with Mr Chan – but by then their own relationship, packed with silences, glances, things said and unsaid, is seen moving, scene by scene, into their little bubble. Till things to fall apart. The couple is cast in red as they come together to work on a script and there's a capture of the first stirrings of desire; the scenes are awash in green as their feelings develop and they acknowledge it; shades of yellow tinge the scenes of looking back. Young artist Varad Bang was mesmerised by the 'painterliness' of these scenes. Inspired by the film, Bang's paintings draw on the film, a treat for the eyes, and create the scenes anew in light and shadow, through selected interiors reminiscent of Vermeer—the Dutch painter is also an inspiration—and Wong Kar-wai's dimly lit Hong Kongscapes, but that could recall an urban setting anywhere where due to lack of time, moments of connection are rare, or fleeting, or cut short. Those paintings are currently hung at Delhi's Pristine Gallery, in an exhibition titled 'The Weight of Love' till May 11. Starting out Bang grew up in Aurangabad, and now lives in Pune. He came to art via architecture. He found it to be a discipline that was 'too structured'. Art helped soothe him, get him in a zone with 'no disturbance'. The idea that he could be a painter grew on him over some time while he tried out different things only to figure that art was his 'way of speaking with the world or with the people around me'. He went on to study art in Florence, where he produced figurative works, and studied the old masters. He also grew to love what was, initially, a struggle. 'It was quite tough for me to understand oil painting. In oil painting, you can't paint in just one layer. You have to put in the work, and spend days and weeks building on the layers. And you're always into the painting. You can't be out of it,' he says, as if recreating the mood in which the romantic couple stayed in pretty much all through Wong Kar-wai's film – the mood of tracing and re-tracing a passion, what they imagine to be the paces of their respective partners falling in love with each other. Or, as Chow put it: 'I was only curious to know how it started. Now I know.' It's a proxy life, but when they stop talking in circles and the time comes to make a break with their failed relationships, Mr Chow and Mrs Can would rather keep their feelings for each other on freeze. Bang's paintings show the same flush of unspoken desire—in it the woman waits, the couple walk side by side but their hands don't touch, the man smokes into the night preferring solitude over action. Re-creating a mood But why simply recreate frames and characters of such a well-loved film? Bang explains: 'I read a book called On Photography by Susan Sontag. She says if you take the stills away from a film, they have a different context. A film unfolds over time while a painting stays in that moment, and when you look at it like that, in an exhibition, where there are lots of paintings by me, they will interrelate with each other. There's like a collective meaning there. Also, while watching a film, the frame that you're looking at is an editor's selection and it guides your feelings. But looking at a painting in a gallery, you have the control over which particular scene you want to have more impact on you. So, that sparked off the idea in me to take particular scenes from the film and paint them, so that the viewer can look at it as long as s/he wants and derive whatever meaning s/he wants, and just soak in that feeling." Bang's paintings are also geared for short attention spans and quick epiphanies. In his words: 'Today, the way we watch movies on OTT platforms, isn't it an accepted way of watching movies? You can watch one at your convenience, take a break, and come back to it.' Staging an encounter The exhibition flow has also been structured to keep today's audience in mind. The paintings are prompters of feelings, arrangements of encounters in which curiosity is the first overture that is followed by an invitation, and then the beginning of the ending. 'The way I've chosen the scenes, and the way the exhibition has been structured, the starting scenes you will find are quite wholesome, warm — they lighten up the mood. Then the scenes get more distant—they have a cooler tone—more emptied out, like the way love fades away over time,' says the artist. 'I tried to blur the lines between the audience and the characters in my work—you'll see lots of scenes where you don't see the faces,' he adds. 'The characters are in the middle of a certain moment; or they're physically there but thinking of the other person. And then there are certain paintings where you see the faces, which kind of remind the viewer that you're not them, you're living their world. So, it's an interplay between all these different states as well. The experience of love and longing, and then the memory of it; love in the present and in the absent.' Heartbreak is an important feeling, Bang says. It's a house many people stay in. 'We kind of neglect it, put it down. But I have a feeling that it teaches you things, which even love might not,' he says.
South China Morning Post
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
‘Global' Hong Kong mustn't lose sight of its own beauty
Hong Kong doesn't need to chase the sameness of Coldplay concerts and viral trends. It needs to be assured in its own taste This spring, In the Mood for Love is once again flickering on cinema screens in Hong Kong. More than two decades on, Wong Kar-wai's film has lost none of its glow. A meditation on time, restraint and unspoken desire, it quietly signals that Hong Kong once moved to a different rhythm. It is tempting to read this re-release as political, especially in a city where cultural memory has become a muted form of dissent. In truth, the film captures not the colonial past but the emotional present. What draws people to Wong's work is not nostalgia – rather, it's atmosphere, mood or the slow, deliberate pacing of life. Much of In the Mood for Love was filmed in Bangkok, a location chosen not for strict accuracy but for its ability to evoke a Hong Kong that no longer physically existed. That choice says everything: Wong is not archiving the past; he is conjuring up its emotional temperature and memories of fleeting spaces. With projects such as his television series Blossoms Shanghai and his curatorial work for the Prada restaurant in Shanghai, Wong continues to shape mood. Though set in the 1990s, Blossoms often evokes 1920s Shanghai through layered interiors and stained light. Wong insists that beauty does not belong in archives but in daily life: in stairwells, gestures and silence. For the director, Shanghai and Hong Kong are not just cinematic backdrops but emotional landscapes. Born in one city and raised in the other, he embodies haipai – Shanghai style – a cross-cultural current flowing between the two cities. His films trace a rhythm once shared by the cities, carried by migration, commerce and memory. Some of the world's most influential business empires, from China Merchants to Jardine Matheson, are not just headquartered in Hong Kong, they were born or remade here. Many would have begun as modest ventures in a city that offered rare opportunities for growth at the edge of empires. Maggie Cheung in a still from the 25th anniversary edition of In The Mood For Love. Photo: Jet Tone Production The city's commercial rise was never just the product of laissez-faire ideals. It was shaped by family businesses, trading houses and cross-border capital that found in Hong Kong a unique stage. In return, they shaped the city – how people dressed, ate and imagined their place in the world. Newsletter Daily Opinion By submitting, you consent to receiving marketing emails from SCMP. If you don't want these, tick here {{message}} Thanks for signing up for our newsletter! Please check your email to confirm your subscription. Follow us on Facebook to get our latest news. These firms could not have emerged the same way anywhere else. This is not to romanticise capital, but to recognise Hong Kong as a place of reinvention. Today, the critical question is not whether Hong Kong still matters, but whether its influence can shift from efficiency to authorship. If the hands that once shaped its commerce still define its skyline, perhaps they can also help restore a more deliberate kind of beauty. Not branding. Not nostalgia. Not luxury for its own sake, but a textured, intentional authenticity. Adrian Cheng's K11 represented one recent attempt at this, bringing art into retail before the market was ready. The timing was unfortunate. But the aspiration remains compelling: what if a city could feel again? Something seems to be shifting. The popularity of local films like The Last Dance and a renewed interest in tailoring and neon signs are no accident. They reflect a hunger for something more grounded. Global aesthetic slop, homogenised, packaged and served with algorithmic precision, is wearing thin. As conspicuous consumption evolves, catching a Coldplay concert has become social currency; that too says something about the city. Chris Martin at Coldplay's concert at the Kai Tak Stadium on April 9. Photo: Harvey Kong Hong Kong does not need to chase sameness. It needs to remember and be assured in its own taste, whether it's smoke curling up from incense coils at Man Mo Temple, chandeliers glittering at the Peninsula, or red plastic stools gleaming under fluorescent light. These are not trends, but texture – identity, even. And there are ways to carry them forward without flattening them into another viral design language. Hong Kong can still absorb global influences and express them in a vocabulary that feels local and lived in, as it once did. It shouldn't need to mimic the next trending aesthetic to matter. It should let its inheritance evolve into something alive. To return to Wong, the point is not to look back, but inwards, asking what kind of future knows how to feel deeply. Policy can support this shift. The aesthetic life is not a luxury but a civic resource. Private-public partnerships might seed a film archive in Sai Ying Pun or fund apprenticeships in Cantonese opera and letterpress. There could even be another Hong Kong-Shanghai cultural corridor – to give the next generation tools to see. Business once sculpted Hong Kong. It can set the city's cultural pulse racing again. Bring back the neon. Bring back the stories. Bring back the belief that living beautifully is still possible – not for old times' sake, but for a future that remembers how to see.
South China Morning Post
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
‘Global' Hong Kong mustn't lose sight of its own beauty
This spring, In the Mood for Love is once again flickering on cinema screens in Hong Kong. More than two decades on, Wong Kar-wai's film has lost none of its glow. A meditation on time, restraint and unspoken desire, it quietly signals that Hong Kong once moved to a different rhythm. Advertisement It is tempting to read this re-release as political, especially in a city where cultural memory has become a muted form of dissent. In truth, the film captures not the colonial past but the emotional present. What draws people to Wong's work is not nostalgia – rather, it's atmosphere, mood or the slow, deliberate pacing of life. Much of In the Mood for Love was filmed in Bangkok, a location chosen not for strict accuracy but for its ability to evoke a Hong Kong that no longer physically existed. That choice says everything: Wong is not archiving the past; he is conjuring up its emotional temperature and memories of fleeting spaces. With projects such as his television series Blossoms Shanghai and his curatorial work for the Prada restaurant in Shanghai, Wong continues to shape mood. Though set in the 1990s, Blossoms often evokes 1920s Shanghai through layered interiors and stained light. Wong insists that beauty does not belong in archives but in daily life: in stairwells, gestures and silence. For the director, Shanghai and Hong Kong are not just cinematic backdrops but emotional landscapes. Born in one city and raised in the other, he embodies haipai – Shanghai style – a cross-cultural current flowing between the two cities. His films trace a rhythm once shared by the cities, carried by migration, commerce and memory. Advertisement
