In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Wong Kar-wai’s seminal film In the Mood for Love, Janus Films will be presenting a touring retrospective for the Hong Kong auteur’s remarkable catalog titled ‘World of Wong Kar-wai.’
The retrospective includes brand new 4K restorations of several titles from the director’s filmography — As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love—and an extended director’s cut of The Hand.
The restorations were overseen by Wong Kar-wai himself: “At the end of my film In The Mood For Love, there was a caption:
He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.
It was my exact feeling when I watched the film again in 2015. In collaboration with the Criterion Collection and with the meticulous work of L’Immagine Ritrovata, we spent five years on the restoration of not only In the Mood For Love, but also the rest of this collection. Now, the window is no longer dusty.”
Wong Kar-wai’s films are known for their intimate stories of love, loneliness and the search for human connection, as well as their ethereal and dreamlike aesthetic. The latter is made possible thanks to the director’s frequent collaboration with Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
The touring event was originally scheduled for the summer, but was later postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The retrospective will now begin on 25 November and will expand nationwide on 11 December. Tickets for virtual screenings are available through the official website for Film at Lincoln Center.
Fans of the director can also look forward to his upcoming series, Blossoms, which is based on a novel of the same name and is described as an homage to the filmmaker’s birthplace, Shanghai. He’s also working on a sequel for Chungking Express, the film that brought him to international prominence.
One can assume that a box set of the newly restored films could be made available in the near future, but as of right now, no such thing has been announced.
Words by Kai-Ming Chow
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