NOTE: written during our New York Asian Film Festival 2013. Jackie Chan was our guest that year and we showed a sweeping retrospective of his films, including Drunken Master 2. That movie’s director and co-star, the legendary Lau Kar-leung, passed away as the retrospective began and suddenly his movies looked a whole lot different.

Yesterday I went up to watch our print of Jackie Chan's DRUNKEN MASTER 2, which turned out to be a very different experience than I thought it was going to be. On Tuesday of this week, the film's co-director and co-star, Lau Kar-leung passed away of leukemia at the age of 76. Lau was one of the most influential and respected directors in Hong Kong. While choreographing action scenes for other directors at Shaw Brothers, and later directing his own films, he helped invent the action movie as we know it today. The training montage? He turned it into a setpiece. Stuntmen still use tricks he invented. Video games still ape plot devices he came up with. He's that huge.

The fact that he died of leukemia is also difficult for me. In January of this year, our friend Dan Craft died of a secondary cancer after spending years battling leukemia. Dan was a member of Subway Cinema and one of the four guys behind the New York Asian Film Festival for many, many years. He was also a huge fan of action movies, and if he had still been alive it would have been him onstage doing the Q&A with Jackie Chan, not me. If not for Dan, the NYAFF would not exist the way it does today. DRUNKEN MASTER 2 also features a terrific performance by Anita Mui, Hong Kong's diva of Cantopop who passed away of untreated cervical cancer ten years ago at the age of 40.

In the face of all this death, and all these reminders of death, watching DM2 yesterday was not a morbid experience. Far from it. Movies are alive. A picture is static, it hangs there. You look at it. A movie moves, it changes over time. You don't just watch a movie, you experience it. Movies are a way of saying, "Fuck you, Death. You got their bodies, but we have their souls."

Because watching Lau up there, seeing all his talent, all his passion, all his training in action, it felt like watching more than just a photograph in motion. I come from a family where Sunday School was mandatory and the image of Lau onscreen is everything I was taught a soul is. It represents the best part of him, it's made of light, and it'll last forever. Over time the small family dramas, the interpersonal relationships, the faults and failings of his life, all those transitory things will fade. What we'll be left with is this bigger, timeless version of him. And when people go to see his movies, this version of Lau will make them laugh, it will speak to them personally, it will heal their hurts at least for a little while, it will take them outside of themselves.

At 2pm on Thursday, June 27th I sat in a movie theater with about one hundred people and together we all had one of the most profound experiences that anyone was having on this planet, anywhere, right at that moment. We watched a Lau Kar-leung movie. It wasn't much, but for that 102 minutes it felt like spending a little time with his soul.