Previously at the ICA - Films

Still: Beautiful 2012, Dir. Kim Tae-yong, Tsai Ming-liang, Ann Hui & Gu Changwei, Hong Kong 2012.

LFF: Beautiful 2012 (Mei Hao 2012)

15 Oct 201216 Oct 2012

This superb package of shorts by leading East Asian directors (commissioned by the Hong Kong Film Festival) offers four kinds of pleasure. There’s a sophisticated sketch of the space between emotional imposture and sincerity in Kim Tae-yong’s episode, about a closeted young man who hires a girl to play his fiancée for the benefit of his dying father. Tsai Ming-liang’s masterly episode has no words except the lyrics to one of Sam Hui’s loveliest songs; a mysterious barefoot man (a monk?) moves through the day and night of Hong Kong at a haunted pace of his own. Gu Changwei’s calculatedly offhand episode centres on a candid family conversation about pregnancies, wanted and unwanted. And Ann Hui zeroes in with empathy on a middle-aged office worker who has finally decided to act on his conviction that he’s actually a woman – to the dismay of his wife.

Dir. Kim Tae-yong, Tsai Ming-liang, Ann Hui, Gu Changwei, Hong Kong 2012, 90min.
Cast: Gong Hyo-jin, Lee Kang-Sheng, Yan Lianke.

When

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E.g., 01-08-2021