Metrograph and Subway Cinema, in association with Taipei Cultural Center in New York, Ministry of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan) present the 10th Old School Kung Fu Fest: Sword Fighting Heroes Edition, from the 21st to 30th of April.
The Old School Kung Fu Fest is back, and this time flying through the air and chopping down fools with the biggest retrospective of Taiwanese wuxia (sword-fighting hero) movies ever seen in New York City. Wuxia movies have a long history in Chinese cinema, but when King Hu’s Dragon Inn premiered in 1967, it kicked off a wuxia revival that reinvented action movies, so Metrograph and Subway Cinema celebrate the wuxia movies from King Hu’s homeland of Taiwan by going big or going home. With 12 movies on the big screen and three more online, Metrograph and Subway Cinema showings include:
– The US premiere of The King of Wuxia, an epic documentary about King Hu, the revolutionary filmmaker who re-invented wuxia movies and turned them into high art, plus three of his best films — the monumental and unmissable A Touch of Zen, and two of his most action-packed flicks, The Valiant Ones and The Fate of Lee Khan.
– All three movies in the essential Tsai Ying-jie Trilogy: Joseph Kuo’s The Swordsman of All Swordsman (US premiere of the new digital restoration), The Bravest Revenge (online only), and the wild and wooly Ghost Hill.
– So many sword-slinging heroines! We’ve got four films starring actress Hsu Feng (A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, The Valiant Ones, A City Called Dragon), four starring Polly Shang-kuan (Swordsman of All Swordsmen, Ghost Hill, Grand Passion, The Bravest Revenge), and one starring the massive movie star, Josephine Siao Fong-fong (The Daring Gang of Nineteen From Verdun City) in which she’s only 12 years old.
– So many discoveries, from the three female Chinese opera stars, Yang Li-hua, Liu Ching, and Chin Mei playing the heroic sisters of Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters, a 1968 movie that feels like the French New Wave doing wuxia; to megastar Brigitte Lin in the underseen Night Orchid, a 1983 Taiwanese feature film remake of a wildly popular Hong Kong TV series.
– So many puppets in The Legend of the Sacred Stone, the all-puppet wuxia from the Huang family, master puppeteers who owned Taiwanese airwaves with their po-te-hi puppet storytelling in the 1980s.
– Shu Qi starring in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2015 deconstruction of the wuxia genre The Assassin, which is also his loving tribute to the movies he grew up on.
Metrograph NYC, launched in 2016, is an independent movie theater at 7 Ludlow that focuses on premieres, rare archival screenings (35mm and digital), and special Q&As, for a wide spectrum of audiences, filmmakers, and communities. Metrograph NYC includes an on-site restaurant, The Commissary, and a bookstore. Metrograph is the ultimate destination for movie lovers. A specially curated world of cinema inspired by the great New York movie theaters of the 1920s and the Commissaries of the Hollywood Studio backlots, Metrograph is a community inhabited by movie professionals screening their work, taking meetings, watching films, collaborating together — an audience built around our shared love of cinema.
Metrograph At Home / Metrograph’s programming team is personally curating dozens of new titles and exciting new series to join–and remain–on Metrograph At Home. This rapidly growing library is available to Metrograph Members anywhere in the U.S., so join today!
Subway Cinema Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit volunteer-run organization dedicated to the exhibition and appreciation of Asian popular cinema and the preservation of America’s Asian film exhibition heritage. Founded in 1999, it has played a key role in nurturing the growth of Asian film culture in the U.S. by championing the works of Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Takashi Miike, Kim Jee-woon, Ryoo Seung-wan, Seijin Suzuki, Sion Sono, and other notable directors.
It founded and ran the annual New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) for 17 consecutive years, establishing it as North America’s leading festival of popular Asian cinema. Subway Cinema’s current focus is on retrospective programming, including the Old School Kung Fu Fest (a showcase for the best of classic martial arts and action films) and Hong Kong-a-Thon! (12-hour marathons of classic Hong Kong action films from the 80s and 90s).
For further information, please visit the following links:
Website: https://metrograph.com/Website: www.subwaycinema.com / twitter: @subwaycinema / instagram: @subwaycinema
Images, provided by EG PR, -Night Orchid (Courtesy of Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute) – Adam Cheng and Brigitte Lin.jpg
A City Called Dragon (Courtesy of Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute) – Hsu Feng
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