DUEL TO THE DEATH (Hong Kong, 1983)
Directed by: Ching Siu-tung
Starring: Norman Chu, Damian Lau

Everyone (rightly) credits Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (also screening in this year’s festival) for leading a revolution in the Hong Kong film industry, but DUEL TO THE DEATH, released the same year, deserves just as much attention. Zu burst from the fevered brow of Hong Kong’s greatest director, Tsui Hark, and his special effects crew. DUEL TO THE DEATH, on the other hand, is the fever dream of Hong Kong’s greatest action choreographer, Ching Siu-tung, a directorial debut in which he could pack all the insane ideas he’d had in eleven years of orchestrating the action for other people’s movies. And what kind of ideas did he have? Kite ninjas. Giant ninjas. Sword pogo. Red wigged teleporting demons. And some of the most intricate, creative and unrivaled flying ever seen on the silver screen.

During the Ming Dynasty, once every ten years, China’s best martial artists travel to a remote village where they duel with the finest fighters from Japan to determine which country will dominate the martial arts world for the next decade. This time around, one of the swordsmen from Japan and one from China both discover a conspiracy to pervert the competition and then they also discover….ninjas! Combatants are suspended in spider-web-like nets that float in an endless void, ninjas fly in to attack a lone swordsman while riding enormous, silent kites, Shaolin monks take on a group of ninjas who use their bodies to construct a giant version of themselves. It’s all a fevered ride of nightmarish impossibilities and blink-and-you-missed-it wonders. Anchoring the film are Norman Chu and Damian Lau (both men also appear in Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain) as two noble swordsmen determined to stop the conspiracy so that they can square off against one another and figure out, once and for all, which is the better martial artist.

It all climaxes in a duel, now considered one of the classic scenes in Hong Kong cinema, between the two leads on a barren rock, jutting high above the sea, that was only accessible via a two hour boat ride. “When I was young,” Ching Siu-tung says. “There was a Martial Arts World magazine. I often fantasized about the martial arts described in those stories. So why not put that world onto celluloid? What would it be like to enter a world like that?” There aren’t many movies that flawlessly put a young boy’s fantasies on the big screen, but in DUEL TO THE DEATH you can trace a line from this baroque, beautifully imagined movie all the way back to that young kid, lying in his bedroom and dreaming up