HKIFF46 第四十六屆香港國際電影節

Tang Zhijun, an editor of a science fiction magazine, attempts to find signs of an alien civilisation. When a strange young man claims to have received instructions from aliens, Tang and his team follow him in search of extraterrestrial creatures.

2021 film directed by C.B. Yi

2021 film

2021 Chinese film

“Our family is special”, says filmmaker Lei Lei’s father Lei Jiaqi. On the audio track of this inventive, poignant essay film he starts to talk about the struggles of his family, amid China’s troubled times of the 1960s. When his own father, Lei Ting, is sent to the countryside, he stays behind with his sister and his ill mother. When Mum passes away, and the system forbids Ting to come back to live with his children, the kids are kept in an orphanage.
Not long after, history repeats itself: once again, Ting is sent to a re-education centre, branded a class traitor – this time because of a new political movement. The family is split. All they can do is write to each other. The daughters are older and going to university, while Jiaqi and his new mother are sent to the countryside. They all wait to be reunited one day.
For the images, the director mixes and reinvents materials, including brightly coloured clay puppets, propaganda images, surrealist collage, and pop-art animation. The animation is an imagined and fantastic representation of what happened to the family at the time: locked in cages, Jiaqi and his sister become birds, and Ting – as half bird, half man – can also fly.
Although the turbulent recent history of China is the thread running through this film, the strong, vivacious family takes the foreground. Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish is an ode to family, memory, and the reconstruction of family history in the History of China.

Julius is an eloquent young museum attendant loved by his friends, colleagues and his girlfriend.
One day he invites his colleagues on a sailing trip on his aristocratic family’s boat. But something goes wrong. Julius is not who he seems to be.

Manik is a lonely middle-aged man who lives with his father, but with whom he has no contact. Instead, his life consists of taking care of his plants and ants, plus a spider and a lizard. But then a change happens in the man’s dull life – he notices a cloud in the sky that seems to follow him all the time. Life takes on a new, previously unknown value for him. Is it friendship or perhaps love?

Once the spray tan and stage makeup are washed away after her latest bodybuilding competition, Edina is immediately back at the gym. World championships are quickly approaching, and there’s more pressure riding on her proportionately built shoulders than ever. Adam, her partner and trainer, and former bodybuilding champion himself, closely monitors her food and supplement intake, criticizing any small misstep. As the financial, emotional, and physical burden of maintaining her lifestyle increases, Edina finds spiritual release in the unlikeliest of places — working as a specialty escort.
From the grueling workouts and controlling atmosphere at the gym to the playful, freewheeling nature of the escort service, Gentle deftly navigates Edina’s disparate worlds and the mounting friction between them. Co-directors Anna Nemes and László Csuja intimately explore the underbelly of an industry solely devoted to appearance, revealing its human cost. Nonprofessional actor Eszter Csonka delivers a powerful corporeal performance as Edina, using her sturdy physique to subtly evoke Edina’s internal struggle between cementing her legacy as a world champion and leaving it all behind to save herself.

The story of a Ukrainian family living on the border of Russia and Ukraine during the start of the war. Irka refuses to leave her house even as the village gets captured by armed forces. Shortly after they find themselves at the center of an international air crash catastrophe on July 17, 2014.

2022 film directed by Emmanuelle Nicot

40岁的抑郁症患者瓦利德与他的妻儿一起生活在海法，梦想从事写作的职业。当瓦利德与新邻居——一个住在他公寓楼里、负债累累的三流骗子成为朋友时，他的生活发生了变化，两人逐渐变得形影不离，但他们对这份友谊有着不一样的看法。

Although a lowlander, Marco is a robust fellow. He is now working as a farmhand for mountain farmer Alois in a remote Swiss alpine village and, even at the regulars’ table at the local inn, people are slowly learning to appreciate this iced tea drinker. Anna is a local village girl; she has a daughter, Julia, from a previous relationship. Some doubt whether this new relationship will work out – but not Marco or Anna. They get married. Their love is gentle and beautiful; unable to fully fathom it, they express it in simple words. The trust between them grows and their tenderness endures; the happiness they feel at every touch is only surpassed by the warmth of stroking a cow. But soon Marco seems to be losing control of his impulses more and more often ...
Humankind and nature merge in a unique way in Michael Koch’s film. Powered by the congenial normality of its non-professional cast, his work follows the rhythm of the seasons with a tranquil conviction that is devoid of hysteria in spite of the circumstances – even if body and soul are fraught with tension. A jewel of a film.

Time seems to move slowly far out on the cracked, dry land of the Bolivian Altiplano, where an elderly Quechua couple, Virginio and Sisa, carry on a humble routine. When their grandson Clever shows up, Virginio quickly sniffs out that he is there just to convince them to move to the city. The fact that the drought has left them without water doesn’t help their case for staying. All the while, Virginio’s heavy breathing betrays his ability to hide what’s ailing him. Suddenly the slow pace of time becomes precious. Will they follow in the steps of other Quechuas and leave their home for the city?
In his feature debut, Alejandro Loayza Grisi renders a time-honored transition with the magnitude and profundity it deserves. The quest for finite resources like water and time may feel like a familiar tale, but the striking cinematography lensed by the brilliant Barbara Alvarez, along with potent performances, lend the film an extra charge of urgency. Utama is a universal story of epic proportions.

2022 film directed by Shaunak Sen

Di is a 12-year-old girl from the mist-shrouded mountains of northern Vietnam. She belongs to the Hmong, an ethnic minority in which girls get married at a very young age. This is often preceded by a controversial “bride-napping,” where the girl is abducted by her future husband on New Year’s Eve. Negotiations between the families follow.
This also happened to Di’s sister and their mother, so it doesn’t seem strange that in preparation the women and girls discuss sex and married life without embarrassment. But Di also goes to school, where she learns very different values. And in her own way, even Di’s mother tries to warn her daughter about child marriage.
Director Diem Ha Le tells a story about the clash between ancient customs and modern values, in a place where children from a traditional culture also have access to the outside world. Her first full-length documentary is a moving film about the challenges faced by a young Hmong girl, but above all is about a teenager with a strong character, and who is not just a victim.

我们静静地凝视这座位于高原上的寺庙，记录下四季轮换里觉姆隐秘的日常。纪录片试图探寻她们深邃的内心世界，并思考我们人类与这个世界的关系

An audition for men aged between 16 and 99. There are no props nor make-up, just pure improvisation. All that is required is the willingness to engage openly with the topic and language of the words on the page. No small challenge, since the text in question is the scandalous novel published anonymously in 1906 “Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself” which, as this film confirms, continues to be the subject of passionate and controversial discussions about desire, even today. What might be world-class pornographic literature for some is seen by others as an abusive depiction of child sexuality. In an intelligently arranged, experimental setting that permits analysis, emotion, reflection and intimacy in equal measure, these men transcend the boundaries of literary debate, opening up insights for us and for themselves into the cosmos of eroticism and sexuality – both within and beyond the confines of male fantasy. A cinematic experiment poised between imagination and identity that neither negates nor invokes its central taboo. For this reason it tells us a lot, not least about “#Me” as well as #MeToo.

At 17:00 every day, Andrew, a middle-aged man, drives home from work through Melbourne’s outer suburbs in peak-hour traffic. Occasionally, he offers a lift home to a younger colleague, David. Over a year, their tentative small talk gives way to a warm friendship and open conversation within the confines of the vehicle, incrementally revealing their lives.
One may wonder what a three-hour film, set almost entirely in a car and shot with a fixed camera from the back, can deliver? The answer is an unexpectedly engaging and entertaining observation of the rhythms of daily life, and a catalogue of suburban worries. In sensorial terms, The Plains charts the passage of time as the seasons change. The pitter-patter of rain and the familiar cocoon of the car provide a sense of comfort and safety from the outside elements. The car is the liminal space between work and home, as the day is pondered, the night planned. Documentary elements exist beyond the windscreen, as a fiction courses through the vehicle. The Plains is a road movie unlike anything you have seen before.

2022 film directed by Alon Schwartz

烏胡伊烏瓦瓦族世世代代居於巴西亞馬遜叢林，仍守着其傳統文化及生活方式。極右總統博索納羅上台，卻揚言開發更多原住民保護區。雨林周邊的貧農乘勢入侵，以開墾之名，砍伐樹木闢地謀生。衝突如箭在弦，一名矢志保衛叢林的族中青年遇害，令族人團結，以航拍機揭露入侵真相，自建媒體進行輿論反擊。阿歷士普里茲首作，鋪陳正反雙方觀點，凸顯原住民生存挑戰及生態危機，矛頭指向縱容侵佔叢林的始作俑者。辛丹斯電影節世界紀錄片評審團特別獎。