HKFA's The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures

A debt collector has no other choice than to spend the night in a haunted temple, where he encounters a female ghost, whom he falls in love with. To save her soul he must work with a monk to defeat the tree demon who owns her spirit.

An adaptation of Tong Tik-sang's now-legendary Cantonese Opera piece, the film features divas Yam Kim-fai and Pak Suet-sin (left with Yam), who play the story's lead lovers, and Lan Chi Pak, the sinister official who tries to break up the relationship. Leung Sing-po plays the pair's friend as well as the mysterious 'man in yellow' who exposes pl...

When a young street thug becomes friends with the headmaster of a school, he gives up the triad life to enroll in the school.

In pre-revolutionary China, two young girls, Chunhua and Yuehong Xing, rise through the ranks of Chinese opera, but with their artistic success comes a new series of personal and social challenges.

Ko Chow is an undercover cop who is under pressure from all sides. His boss, Inspector Lau, wants him to infiltrate a gang of ruthless jewel thieves; his girlfriend wants him to commit to marriage or she will leave Hong Kong with another lover; and he is being pursued by other cops who are unaware that he is a colleague. Chow would rather quit t...

Two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting friendship will span nearly 70 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China's history.

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries.

Cold Nights features great performances by both Pak Yin as a tough minded “new woman”, Shusheng, and Ng Cho-fan as her weak husband, Wang Wenxuan, whose spirits have been crushed by the Sino-Japanese war.

A newly appointed court official is shocked at the corruption he witnesses.

In Ming Dynasty China, the retiring abbot of a Buddhist monastery invites two dignitaries to help him choose a successor, not suspecting that both of them have hired help to steal a priceless parchment kept in the temple.

Chan Ka Kui (Jackie Chan) is a Hong-Kong policeman, who single handedly captures and arrests a big drug lord. The drug-lord then frames Kevin with the murder of a corrupt cop. Now a fugitive cop killer, Chan Ka Kui must try to catch the drug lord and clear his name.

Unable to make it as a commercial success because he staunchly refuses to sell out, a struggling Hong Kong musician rediscovers his love of music and regains an interest in his life's meaning through his relationship with a dying girl.

A Taiwanese-American man is happily settled in New York with his American boyfriend. He plans a marriage of convenience to a Chinese woman in order to keep his parents off his back and to get the woman a green card. Chaos follows when his parents arrive in New York for the wedding.

China's rapid changes from the late-1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.

Grace Chang delivers an eye-opening performance as a lusty nightclub singer climbing the social ladder in seedy Wanchai. Borrowing story and song elements from Georges Bizet’s CARMEN, this Wong Tin-Lam directed musical has flair and polish to rival Hollywood, and a superstar leading lady that would any film industry would have a tough time match...

Poor teacher Chan Chi-hong, his wife Lee Yuk-mei and their five children survive on his meagre pay. When he is laid off by two schools in a row, the family runs into difficulties. The children resort to begging on the streets to pay the mother's medical bills. Turning to writing, Chan's novel fails to find a publisher and, worse still, he comes ...

Adapted from a popular 'three dime novel' the story revolves around two down-and-out buddies, one streetwise and quick-witted the other naïve and kind-hearted. This oddball duo go through up and downs and eventually get their break in life.

A sociopathic beauty urges three nerdy pranksters to embark on a deranged rampage.

Chronicles the growth of a young woman as she dabbles in Hong Kong’s independent film scene. Based in part on Hui’s real-life experiences.

Yan and Fan are neighbors in Hong Kong's Mong Kok district. Yan is a 21-year-old prostitute who works for a pimp and spends her off-hours watching TV in her miniscule apartment or hanging out with other prostitutes at a local cafe.

Chen Shaochang (Shi Hui), a primary school principal widowed at a young age, raises his children alone. His close friend's daughter, Liu Minhua (Zhu Jiachen), whom he hasn't seen for many years, begins working at the primary school through his introduction. Chen Shaochang's son, Jianzhong (Han Fei), and daughter-in-law, Feng Lijun (Li Huanqing),...

Sister Ye lives in a rural village, where everyone makes traditional toys. When Sister Ye's husband dies of an unknown illness, and while Ye is attending to him, her son is kidnapped and sold to a wealthy lady in the city of Shanghai. Shortly after, the village is destroyed during an attack between rival warlords, forcing the villagers move to t...

Set during a period of depression, the film chronicles the daily lives of a single urban building split up into several separate units, and the actual people that dwell within.

Four carefree lovers in Hong Kong enjoy their youth while danger looms on the edges.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. In the city, A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

A poet named Butterfly and her friend Kuen visit a stranger's mansion to return some possessions that were unintentionally taken. At the house, they stumbled upon an illegal weapons trade that ultimately went bad. To evade the police from interrogations, the two innocent witnesses wiped away their fingerprints and left a note that stated that th...

A young Shaolin follower reunites with his discouraged brothers to form a soccer team using their martial art skills to their advantage.

In this Chinese version of The Phantom of the Opera, the mysterious Song Danping terrorizes the newly rebuilt opera house and its young star.

A group of Mainlanders fleeing the Cultural Revolution risk all to reach the adjacent British ‘haven’ of Hong Kong; yet what they find there is a far cry from their dreams of liberty.

A Cantonese opera company is attacked by an army of ghosts, thanks to a feud between the dead grandfathers of one of the company's actresses and a young man.

A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

The lives of a Beijing family throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as they experience the impact of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

A man who becomes wealthy starts to have an affair and though his wife knows of it, she says nothing. Soon, the affair starts to have consequences and his business falls apart while the man’s sister starts to have a relationship with the brother of his wife.

A young woman in search of a lost identity, her long lost mother who abandoned her soon after her birth.

This tale of familial warfare and sacrifice takes place in hard-pressed Shanghai at the end of the 1940s. Hu Zhiqing can barely support his wife and children, and his situation is worsened by the unexpected arrival of his mother, brother and sister-in-law. When he is fired by his unscrupulous boss, the whole family becomes embroiled in one emoti...

Peigang, his family's only son for three generations running, is to be executed on account of larceny, but not without the intervention of his grandmother.

Based on a novel by the same name written by Gu Hua, a melodrama about the life and travails of a young woman who lives through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

Ko Chun, a renowned gambler, loses his memory in an accident and starts behaving like a child. Little Knife, an amateur gambler, offers him shelter and realizes that he has a penchant for gambling.

Two parallel stories of Wah caught in the mist of a love affair with his beloved cousin, Ngor and his relationship with his triad brother, Fly, who seems to never far out of trouble.

A couple take a trip to Argentina but both men find their lives drifting apart in opposite directions.

In 1960s Hong Kong, two neighbors form an intimate bond after making a discovery about their spouses in this visually stunning tale of unrequited love.

This tale of familial warfare and sacrifice takes place in hard-pressed Shanghai at the end of the 1940s. Hu Zhiqing can barely support his wife and children, and his situation is worsened by the unexpected arrival of his mother, brother and sister-in-law. When he is fired by his unscrupulous boss, the whole family becomes embroiled in one emoti...

A financially struggling office worker goes into debt in order to afford traditional holiday gifts for his boss and landlord. Part of Hong Kong Film Awards' 100 Best Chinese Movies.

An opera troupe has to dissolve in view of the poor economy. Comedian star Sang Kwai-lei loses his job and he has no alternative but to play the lion character in the opera troupe of his former junior apprentice Chan Hau and pawn his stage costume. He aims at earning enough money to support the final year's secondary school studies of his elder ...

China 1839. Because the British imports of opium into Southern China are creating such widespread medical and economic problems, the weak Manchu emperor Tao Kuang is forced to take action that precipitates the 'Opium War'.

A musical adaptation of 'Dream of the Red Chamber'

Imagine an old-school martial arts melodrama about competing fighting schools dropped into the grungy sci-fi world of Blade Runner, and you have an idea of the curious mix of styles in Flash Future Kung Fu. Eddy Ko is the maverick star pupil of an honorable school who secretly engages in underground "Black Boxing" bouts, a black market sport off...

In 1937 Shanghai, a soldier and a young woman have an awkward meet-cute in darkness under a bridge as they seek refuge during a bomb raid. Ten years later, the soldier, now a burgeoning songwriter and tuba-player in a marching band, is back in town desperately searching for his would-be soulmate. As fate would have it they end up living in the s...

The Yangs are betrayed by a government official conspiring with the Mongols. All of the Yang family males except the 5th and 6th brother are killed. Fu Sheng loses his mind after the death of his family, while the other brother takes refuge in a Buddhist temple.

A mining engineer acting as a technical translator is suspected of industrial espionage after sending an innocent telegram that is intercepted by a militant snoop. Placed under investigation and reassigned to a less sensitive department, but never informed of the reason for his demotion, he petitions to get his job back, sparking an increasingly...