The Hong Kong Film Festival is honouring the work of master director King Hu with an extensive retrospective

April's 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival will see an extensive retrospective focusing on master director King Hu, who died early last year. The retro is entitled Transcending The Times: King Hu and Eileen Chang, and will also feature some difficult-to-see works scripted by famous Shanghai novelist Eileen Chang.
"King Hu was way ahead of his contemporaries," says festival programmer and film historian Law Kar. "He was the first to combine the chinese arts - like Beijing opera - with Western techniques of movie-making. Eileen Chang wrote a lot of scripts for commercial films, and was the first to apply cross-cultural themes to Hong Kong films. She brought an international outlook to her work."
The retrospective will feature 10 directorial features by Hu, ranging from classics Like A Touch of Zen and Dragon Inn, to lesser-known works like 1982's All The Kings Men (Tainxia Diyi) and 1992's The Painted Skin (Hua Pi zhi Yinyang Fawang). His 40-minute section of the film Four Moods, called Anger (Nu), will see a stand-alone screening, while The Wheel of Life (Da Lun Hui), of which he directed one part, will be shown in full.
Hu's films are unique in the world of cinema. The first Hong Kong based-director to gain a place on the world stage, Hu's work is a marvellous combination of Chinese history, legend, politics, philosophy and religion, often utilising a martial arts theme. His masterpiece A Touch of Zen is set around the Ming Dynasty's political machinations and is split into three parts. The first part explores the personal angle, the second the political, the third, the religious.
Hu's motivation was a reaction to the West, remembers Law. "When I first met Hu, I asked him why he made these kind of films," he says. "The James Bond films were very popular in Hong Kong at the time, and he seemed annoyed by the idea of white superiority contained in them, as well as the fact that the agents seemed to be invincible."
"He said, 'I am going to make something about Chinese spies, something true to historical facts and something that treats them more like human beings.' It was a kind of reaction against spy films from the West." Richard James Havis