Rétrospective Wong Kar-wai

Each year, Cinéma Galeries hosts a special programmation in autumn which highlights the work of filmmakers through a retrospective. Continuing our focus on Hong Kong during our L’Heure d’Été festival, we celebrate this city’s most iconic director: Wong Kar-wai.

Born in Shanghai in 1958, Wong Kar-wai emigrated to Hong Kong at the age of five. There, he struggled to master Cantonese and English, while being separated from his father and brothers for ten years. This familial and cultural exile profoundly influences his work. Themes of wandering, memory, nostalgia, and separation are central to his films, particularly embodied by the metaphor of “the bird without legs,” a key symbol in Days of Being Wild. Unable to land, the bird must keep on flying to avoid death.

As an independent filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai is a visual poet, whose unique style, partly derived from Hong Kong action cinema, blends abstraction and formal innovation. His collaboration with Chris Doyle and William Chang creates a cinema of rare aesthetic purity. Through his works, he portrays Hong Kong as a character in its own right, shaping the exceptional atmosphere of his narratives.

The retrospective pays tribute to the masterful work of the director, who was awarded twice at the Cannes Film Festival. It will be accompanied by an installation in the cinema, which introduces the cultural and historical context of Wong Kar-wai’s films.