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Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (Iffk), adding to her impressive collection of career recognitions that includes the Venice Film Festival’s career Golden Lion.

The award, which comes with a cash prize of INR1 million, a sculpture, and a citation, will be presented by Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at the festival’s opening ceremony on Dec. 13 at state capital Thiruvananthapuram’s Nishagandhi Auditorium.

Hui, 77, stands as a pivotal figure in Asian cinema, particularly known for her contributions to the Hong Kong New Wave movement. Her five-decade career has consistently focused on social issues, with particular attention to women’s experiences in Hong Kong society. Her work examines themes ranging from gender discrimination to the cultural shifts surrounding Hong Kong’s transition from British colonial rule to Chinese sovereignty.

Born in Anshan, China in...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of Mexican popular cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s is underway.

Film Forum

A career-spanning Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective has begun; restorations of Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody (watch our exclusive trailer debut), Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, Fitzcarraldo and Seven Samurai continue.

Museum of the Moving Image

A 70mm print of Playtime screens this weekend; The Color of Pomegranates and Speed Racer play.

Anthology Film Archives

Robert Bresson plays in “Essential Cinema.”

Bam

Claire Denis’ monumental No Fear, No Die continues screening in a new restoration; Mapantsula begins playing.

Museum of Modern Art

A career-spanning Powell and Pressburger retrospective continues.

IFC Center

The Time Masters, Amadeus, and In the Mood for Love play daily; Fritz the Cat, Friday the 13th, The Last House on the Left, and The Matrix play late.

Metrograph...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Bam

Claire Denis’ monumental No Fear, No Die begins screening in a new restoration.

Museum of the Moving Image

A new 70mm print of The Searchers plays this weekend.

Japan Society

A restoration of Shinji Sōmai’s Moving and Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend play on Friday and Saturday, respectively.

Film Forum

New restorations of Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody (watch our exclusive trailer debut), Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, and Fitzcarraldo begin screening; Seven Samurai and Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room continue.

Anthology Film Archives

Enrique Gómez Vadillo’s rarely screened Death on the Beach shows in a new restoration this Friday; Stan Brakhage plays in “Essential Cinema.”

Museum of Modern Art

A career-spanning Powell and Pressburger retrospective continues, including A Matter of Life and Death and The Tales of Hoffmann.

Nitehawk Cinema

Lucio Fulci...

Ann Hui’s eclectic films are united by a consideration of the relationship between public and private worlds, of how the weight of history can be brought to bear on even the most intimate personal developments. The director’s beautiful 2002 drama July Rhapsody, now receiving its first stateside theatrical run courtesy of Cheng Cheng Films, both follows this thread and pulls it in a uniquely tender and thoughtful direction. Unlike much of her previous work, the histories excavated by the film are strictly personal, but they contribute to a far more wide-ranging treatise on the resonance of artistic expression across time and generations.

Another thread through Hui’s work is its kinship with Chinese literature, from the filmmaker’s three adaptations of Eileen Chang novels to last year’s Elegies, a documentary on Hong Kong poetry. That affinity is deeply felt in July Rhapsody, which follows a meek, middle-aged Chinese...

Directed by Ann Hui and written by Ivy Ho, who actually won a number of awards for her work, “July Rhapsody” presents a portrait of middle life crisis, by additionally including a rather interesting back story that finds its parallels in the present.

July Rhapsody will be screening in Canada and the US starting May 11th, while it will be coming out on home video in September, courtesy of Cheng Cheng Films

Lam and Ching have been married for 20 years and have two sons. While their relationship is smooth, Lam feels that his friends, who have found financial success in the entertainment and business sectors, are more accomplished than him, and their belittling every time they meet does not help. Lam is a teacher of classic Chinese literature at an elite school, and is happy with his job actually, but there is an issue there too. A rather beautiful, smart,...

Hong Kong-based Celestial Tiger Entertainment (Cte) has renewed its exclusive, multi-year output deals with Hong Kong studios Emperor Motion Pictures (Emp), Mega-Vision Project Workshop (Mvpw) and Universe Entertainment.

Under the terms of the deals, Cte has secured first and exclusive pay-tv rights, as well as pay-per-view (PPV), video-on-demand (VOD) and over-the-top (Ott) rights, to each studio’s upcoming slate of movies for Cte’s Celestial Movies channel in Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.

Upcoming Emp productions include Heaven In The Dark, a drama reuniting Jacky Cheung and Karena Lam who both starred in July Rhapsody in 2002; Fruit Chan’s suspense thriller Kill Time, starring Ethan Ruan and Angelababy; and The Mobfathers, starring Anthony Wong and Chapman To.

Mvpw’s slate includes the third installment of blockbuster franchise From Vegas To Macau, which will star Andy Lau in addition to Chow Yun Fat and Nick Cheung. Mvpw is also in pre-production on The Invincible 12, which marks the 100th film from...

The 19th Busan International Film Festival (Biff) has announced its Korean Cinema Retrospective will spotlight veteran director and producer Jung Jin-woo.

Active from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, Jung directed over 50 films including The Only Son, Border Line, Green Rain, A Student Boarder, Chun-Hui, Oyster Village and Does Cuckoo Cry at Night.

Top Korean actresses such as Kim Ji-mee, Moon Hee, Nam Jeong-im and Yoon Jeong-hee rose to stardom through his films.

Biff said: “Jung Jin-woo distinguished himself in social melodrama films dealing with separation on the Korean peninsula or social class barriers in the 60s. He also broadened his field to various issues in the 70s and focused on depicting women’s lives on the verge of crisis in the late 70s to mid- 80s.”

As a producer, he was responsible for more than 130 films including Im Kwon-taek’s 1973 war film Testimony.

He was also successful in the import and distribution of foreign films as...

[Our thanks to Twitch reader James Hadfield for the following review.]

Screenwriter Ivy Ho has penned some memorable films in her time, including July Rhapsody and Comrades, Almost a Love Story, but this is the first time she’s gotten behind the camera to direct one of her own scripts. Claustrophobia is an almost infuriatingly subtle piece of work, which implies much more than it actually shows.

Told in reverse, the story revolves around Pearl (Karena Lam), an attractive young woman who works in the marketing department of a struggling import-export firm. Each day, she leaves the cramped confines of her office to share a car home with her coworkers: boorish know-it-all Karl (Felix Lok), talkative tart Jewel (Chucky Woo), shy nerd John (Derek Wsang) and handsome family man Tom (Ekin Cheng).

HONG KONG -- Anita Mui, a Canto-pop singer and major Hong Kong film star, died here Tuesday of complications from cervical cancer. She was 40. Mui was often dubbed the "Hong Kong Madonna" because of her ever-changing image. As an actress with close to 50 features under her belt, she worked with such stars as Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh in The Heroic Trio, Jackie Chan in The Legend of Drunken Master and Rumble in the Bronx and Chow Yun-fat in The Greatest Lover. Her latest role was in the critically acclaimed July Rhapsody, for which she was nominated for best actress in the 2002 Hong Kong Film Awards.