CineFan May/Jun/Jul Program

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CineFan of Hong Kong released its new film lineup for the months of May, June and July. The main focus are the films of Finnish film director and screenwriter Aki Kaurismäki. Also featuring the films of artist and activist Godfrey Reggio and finally some of the 1960s and 1970s culture inspired classics known as the psychedelic era.

Aki Kaurismäki thinks his own films are dreadful. And his deadpan comedies are grim. But the bleaker the director has become, the more tender his films. No matter how despairing the reality is, his underdog characters always find solace in a sleazy bar, in eccentric rock 'n' roll, and in the company of a devoted canine friend.

Combining the restraint of Robert Bresson with the surrealism of Luis Buñuel, the profound Finn cinephile creates his own cinematic universe of visual stylisation and mordant jokiness for his humane comedy. Highly distinctive but hard to define, Aki's compositions are simple yet subtly expressive; his approach skews towards a tradition of neorealism, yet flecked with fairytalelike fantasy; his ambiance is nostalgic, yet evoking a modernist vibe. With witty irreverence and stylish intelligence, the artist works dichotomy into an arresting sensibility, championing humanity and spontaneous solidarity while sliding out an unspoken critique towards modern alienation and social injustice.

Seeing the Unseen Godfrey Reggio's The Qatsi Trilogy

In his Qatsi (= life) Trilogy, former Catholic monk and artist and activist Godfrey Reggio's critique of technology is not a message, but manifests as cinematic method in the form of non-fiction and wordless, visual narrative. Between poetry and discourse, and via torrents of images transported through Philip Glass' music, cinema becomes, in Reggio's own terms, a 'sacrament' directly confronting the technicised human world by firing it up.

Psychedelia – Cinema as a Fever Dream

Dennis Hopper's 1969 Easy Rider, one of America's first counterculture films that fused mainstream aesthetics with avant-garde tendencies to capture the sociopolitical climate of the time, helped bring psychedelic films into Hollywood. Robert Altman's surreal, dreamlike reality in 3 Women, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's dizzying experiment in Performance, and Hayashi Kaizo's grafting of silentera aesthetics in To Sleep So as to Dream - all see the artists explore the interplay of films and druginduced states of mind as mutually constitutive transformations in human consciousness – and also cinematic adventures.

Some psychedelic films are full-on assault on the senses, pushing your mental state to the edge. Recreating an out-of-body experience fuelled by psychedelic drugs, provocateur Gaspar Noé conceives a transcendental odyssey that defies life and death with masterful aerial shots in Enter the Void. Ken Russell creates a bombastic take on the pop opera genre with Tommy, a relentlessly frenetic musical experience with jaw-dropping visual imagination.

Visit the Official Website for the full program and more information.