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James Marsh

The Hong Kong International Film Festival (IFF) returns this summer with an eclectic programme.
Running from August 15-30, it gives the city’s cinephiles the perfect excuse to escape the sweltering heat to sit in air-conditioned cinemas and enjoy a feast of diverse offerings.
Traditionally offering a more accessible and crowd-pleasing selection than the festival’s centrepiece spring event, Summer IFF this year boasts a new Taiwanese crime comedy, a chilling Hong Kong ghost story, an acclaimed cross-cultural romance, and the latest works from some of world cinema’s most celebrated auteurs.
The event also features a tribute to the late Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, as well as newly restored master works from Japanese legend Yasujiro Ozu.
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There is even a sidebar of immersive VR films, showcasing some of cinema’s newest technological innovations.
With tickets now on sale, below is the Post’s pick of the 10 films and programmes from the festival line-up that are not to be missed.
1. Miss Shampoo
Giddens Ko Ching-teng, the bestselling Taiwanese author and filmmaker behind such hits as You Are the Apple of My Eye and Till We Meet Again, returns with a new madcap crime comedy based on his own short story.
When a trainee hairdresser (Vivian Sung Yun-hua) inadvertently saves the life of a local gang boss (Daniel Hong), the hoodlum is instantly smitten, and orders his squad of loyal minions to go to her salon to have their outrageous hairdos coiffed.


As their wildly different worlds collide, romance and bloodshed inevitably blossom.
2. Back Home
One of the year’s most hotly anticipated Hong Kong films makes its local debut, after premiering to positive reviews at July’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Anson Kong Ip-sang from Hong Kong boy band Mirror takes the lead role, playing a young man who returns to Hong Kong after his mother slips into a coma.
Having spent many years living overseas in Canada, his hometown is an unfamiliar place, and first-time writer-director Nate Tse Ka-ki uses this as a jumping off point for a terrifyingly atmospheric descent into Chinese mythology, superstitions and the supernatural.
3. Past Lives
Canadian playwright Celina Song’s personal experiences inform this achingly romantic drama that is already one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films.


Greta Lee has rocketed into the awards conversation for her performance as a Korean woman whose family emigrated to New York when she was a teenager.
Twenty years later, she is reunited with her first love (Teo Yoo). Over the course of one emotionally turbulent week, both are forced to reassess their choices, priorities and relationships – all of which have helped their adolescent love fade, but never quite disappear.
4. Strange Way of Life
After the positive reception for 2020’s The Human Voice, Spanish sensation Pedro Almodóvar delivers another short-form masterpiece, every bit as stylistically rich and engaging as his feature films.


Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, decked out in gorgeous outfits tailored by Yves Saint Laurent, play a pair of ageing cowboys, reunited after 25 years, and desperate to rekindle their passion for one another.
Life in the Old West, however, is rife with danger, which Almodóvar wrings for all its dramatic worth as only he knows how.
5. Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars
French auteur Jean-Luc Godard may have died in September 2022, but the enduringly prolific filmmaker left us with one last cinematic statement, as adventurous and provocative as ever.


His final film, just 20 minutes in length, takes the form of a trailer for a long-gestating project he was never able to make: an adaptation of Charles Plisnier’s 1937 novel Faux Passeports.
What emerges is a vibrant collage of photographs and reminiscences about Plisnier, a Belgian poet who was expelled from the Communist Party in 1937.
6. Single 8
Godfather of the modern Ultraman franchise, Kazuya Konaka transports us back to his own childhood in the 1970s, and the monumental impact of witnessing George Lucas’ Star Wars for the first time.


Inspired by that film’s opening shot, in which a giant spacecraft thunders overhead, high-schooler Hiroshi (Yu Uemura) rallies his classmates in an attempt to create a science fiction masterpiece of their own.
A delightfully nostalgic tale of youthful exuberance, adolescent romance and analogue filmmaking, Single 8 is catnip for the aspiring filmmaker in all of us.
7. Riddle of Fire
Think Stranger Things as reimagined by Wes Anderson on a Larry Clark budget and you might get somewhere close to Weston Razooli’s delightfully off-kilter debut.


Set in the summery wilderness of rural Wyoming, the film follows a trio of tearaway kids who ride around the woodlands on dirt bikes wielding paintball guns.
When they are tasked with buying eggs to make a cake for one of their ailing mothers, this simple errand turns into a mystical adventure filled with dangerous outlaws and genuine magic.
8. Pema Tseden
Arguably the most prominent filmmaker ever to emerge from Tibet, and the first to complete a feature film entirely in his native language, Pema Tseden died of heart failure in May 2023, at the age of 53.


All seven of his completed films will screen at this summer’s event, and all cast a masterful spotlight on his native region, its heritage and traditions, as well as the impact of its culture’s fast evolution.
Likened to Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar-wai, Tseden showed an aesthetic that was vivid and effusive, and used it to champion the exploits of everyday people.
9. Dragnet Girl
Marking the 120th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu’s birth, five films from the career of Japan’s undisputed master of the domestic drama will be screened in dazzling new restorations.


Alongside a quartet of masterpieces from Ozu’s post-war period is his rarely seen silent genre film Dragnet Girl.
This sumptuous crime melodrama from 1933, in which a young yakuza mobster becomes embroiled in a love triangle with two wildly different women, will be presented with live musical accompaniment by Hong Kong composer and classical musician Olivier Cong.
10. Neo Cine VR


Technological advances in the brave new world of virtual reality have seen the one-time novelty format emerge as a bona fide form of cinematic exploration and expression.
This summer the festival is showcasing the cutting edge of this immersive and interactive medium at the HKFYG (Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups) Jockey Club Media 21 venue in Aberdeen in its Neo Cine VR programme, a fascinatingly diverse selection of offerings.

These include Gina Kim’s award-winning documentary Tearless, Tang Zhi-zhong and Huang Yun-hsien’s digital/stop-motion animated hybrid The Sick Rose, and Lee Chung’s action-packed Mr. Buddha, which transports audiences into a high-speed getaway car, to name just a few of the experiences on offer.
Summer IFF runs from August 15 to 30 at various venues. For full programme details, visit cinefan.hkiff.org.hk.
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Showing in the Hong Kong Summer IFF 2023, Back Home stars boy band Mirror’s Anson Kong, while romance Past Lives co-stars Greta Lee, who has had rave reviews
Ultraman godfather Kazuya Konaka gets nostalgic in Single 8, Ethan Hawke is a gay cowboy in a Pedro Almodóvar short, and Jean-Luc Godard signs off from cinema


Back Home, starring boy band Mirror’s Anson Kong, Celina Song’s romance Past Lives, and a nostalgia trip by Ultraman godfather Kazuya Konaka are among the Post’s 10 must-sees from Hong Kong Summer IFF 2023.
