10th Old School Kung Fu Fest: Swordfighting Heroes Edition!
April 21-30, 2023 at Metrograph
The Old School Kung Fu Fest is back for its 10th anniversary, and this time we’re flying through the air and chopping down fools with the biggest retrospective of Taiwanese wuxia (sword fighting hero) movies ever seen in New York City. Wuxia movies have a long history in Chinese cinema, but when King Hu’s Dragon Inn premiered in 1967, it kicked off a wuxia revival that reinvented action movies, so we’ve decided to celebrate the wuxia movies from King Hu’s homeland of Taiwan by going big with 12 movies on the big screen and three more online. We’re showcasing everything we could find, including:
The US premiere of The King of Wuxia, an epic documentary about King Hu, the revolutionary filmmaker who re-invented wuxia movies and turned them into high art, plus three of his best — the monumental and unmissable A Touch of Zen, and two of his most action-packed flicks, The Valiant Ones (US premiere of the new 4K restoration) and The Fate of Lee Khan.
All three movies in the essential Tsai Ying-jie Trilogy: Joseph Kuo’s The Swordsman of All Swordsman (US premiere of the new digital restoration), The Bravest Revenge (online only), and the wild and woolly Ghost Hill.
So many sword-slinging heroines! We’ve got four films starring actress Hsu Feng (A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, The Valiant Ones, A City Called Dragon), four starring Polly Shang-kuan (Swordsman of All Swordsmen, Ghost Hill, Grand Passion, The Bravest Revenge), two starring Han Hsaing-chin (Ghost Hill and Iron Mistress), and one starring the massive movie star, Josephine Siao Fong-fong (The Daring Gang of Nineteen From Verdun City) when she’s only 12 years old. And it’s heroines all the way to the end, with our screening of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2015 deconstruction and celebration of the wuxia genre, The Assassin, starring Shu Qi.
So many discoveries! From the three female Chinese opera stars, Yang Li-hua, Liu Ching, and Chin Mei playing the heroic sisters of Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters, a 1968 movie that feels like the French New Wave doing wuxia; to megastar Brigitte Lin in the underseen Night Orchid (US premiere of the 2K remaster), a 1983 Taiwanese feature film remake of a wildly popular Hong Kong TV series.
So many puppets! The Legend of the Sacred Stone (International premiere of the new digital restoration) is the all-puppet wuxia from the Huang family, master puppeteers whose po-te-hi puppetry was a major part of Taiwanese pop culture in the ‘80s. We’re finally presenting their puppetry masterpiece uncut and in its original language.
By the time this retro is over, we’ll all have been sliced, diced, hacked, slashed, and blasted into submission with palm power.
