This year the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) will screen eight restored classics. The program features rarely-seen silent films, a long-lost censored Iranian movie, among others.

The HKIFF, which will take place from April 1st until 12th, will be the first hybrid edition in the festival’s history, featuring screenings and audience-engagement events simultaneously in physical and online formats. The festival will unveil its full programme on 9 March.  The public can purchase tickets online and through all URBTIX outlets from 18 March.

Tih Minh (1918) by French filmmaker Louis Feuillade, renowned for this popular silent crime films, is a cinematic treasure distils a sense of mystery and menace into a rumination of humanitarian crises in the aftermath of the First World War.

You Only Live Once (1937) by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang, is his second American feature that heralded an early yardstick of the man-on-the-run picture. Jean-Luc Godard, part of the French New Wave, stunned the world with Breathless (1960). For the 60th anniversary the film was beautifully restored in 4K.

Another interesting film is Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) directed by Gutiérrez Alea, of Cuba’s foremost filmmakers. The film is a black comedy about institutionalised bureaucracy, expressing an outright criticism of Castro’s regime in Buñuelian absurdity.

Finally, the program will screen films from two Iranian filmmakers who offered allegorical insights into their society before and after the Islamic Revolution.  Chess of the Wind (1976) by Mohammad Reza Aslani, was banned after one screened and was presumed lost for decades. The festival will also show two short films (Two Solutions for One Problem (1975) and Tribute to the Teachers (1977)) and a feature film (First Case, Second Case (1979)) from the late maestro Abbas Kiarostami.

To know more about the festival, please go to: https://www.hkiff.org.hk