Herman Yau’s Ip Man - The Final Fight will open this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (March 17-April 2), while Closed Curtain directed by Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi will close the event.
A sequel to Yau’s The Legend Is Born: Ip Man, the film stars Anthony Wong who portrays the Wing Chun master in the later part of his life.
The festival will also screen Wong Kar-wai’s Ip Man biopic, The Grandmaster, which recently screened as the opening film of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Closed Curtain also screened in Berlin where it picked up the Silver Bear for best script.
In total HKIFF will screen 300 titles from 68 countries and regions including 56 world, international and Asian premieres.
Highlights in the selection of Chinese-language films include Ronny Yu’s Saving General Yang, which is gearing up for a wide release in April; Arvin Chen’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, fresh from its Berlin premiere; and Johnnie To’s Drug War.
The line-up also includes two films from up-and-coming Hong Kong filmmakers: Adam Wong’s The Way We Dance and Kiwi Chow’s A Complicated Story.
Following last year’s success with omnibus Beautiful 2012, the festival is again teaming with Chinese video streaming giant Youku to present Beautiful 2013, comprising shorts directed by Hong Kong’s Mabel Cheung, Taiwan’s Wu Nian-jen, China’s Lu Le and Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
The festival will also feature sections focusing on Latin American and Swedish cinema - The Passions Of Latin American Cinema and Swedish Sextet - as well as free public screenings of Korean hit Werewolf Boy and Hong Kong classic The Private Eyes. Targeted at secondary school students, the free screenings are part of a series of outreach programmes designed to encourage film appreciation in Hong Kong.
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