Director’s Spotlight: Tsui Hark
ADFF is
proud to present the Middle East premiere of renowned Hong Kong
director Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom
Flame. The detective story-meets-martial-arts film
will be screened on October 22nd and
23rd.
Tsui is
one of the most popular and influential filmmakers of Hong Kong
cinema. Known for his work's rapid pacing and camerawork, Tsui has
also won acclaim for his stylistic range, moving easily from the
martial arts to gangster dramas to even romance. In addition to
reviving the declining sword-fighting and kung-fu genres in the
early 1990s, he was also instrumental in bringing the special
effects wizardry of Western filmmaking to the East.
Born in
Vietnam in 1951, Tsui made his first 8mm film at the age of 13.
After relocating to Hong Kong in 1966, he attended the University
of Texas, graduating in 1969. He returned to Hong Kong in 1977, and
made his directorial debut two years later with The Butterfly
Killers. After completing 1981's award-winning All the Wrong Clues,
he mounted the ambitious project Zu: Warriors of the Magic
Mountain, a sword-and-sorcery epic employing technicians who were
previously involved with Star Wars and Tron.
Tsui
released his most famous movie to date in 1986: Peking Opera Blues,
a martial-arts farce set in 1913; it was one of the first Hong Kong
productions to receive worldwide interest. That same year, he
produced longtime friend John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, a landmark
effort which switched the focus of the industry towards hard-edged
crime action films.
In 1991,
Tsui directed Once Upon a Time in China, the first in a series of
films about herbalist healer and martial arts master Wong Fei Hung,
which made mainland Chinese actor Jet Li a major star. Between 1994
and 1996 the prolific director released no less than six films,
before traveling to Hollywood to film Double Team with action star
Jean-Claude Van Damme and NBA star Dennis Rodman. Back on his
native soil, he released action thriller Time and Tide in 2001,
followed soon after by The Legend of Zu, the sequel to his 1983 hit
Zu Warriors.
Pushing
technical boundaries further, Tsui produced Master Q 2001, Hong
Kong's first combination of live action and Pixar-style 3-D
computer animation. In 2005, he launched the multimedia production
Seven Swords with a related TV series, comic book series and online
multi-player video game. In 2008, Tsui provided art direction for
the direct-to-video anime feature entitled Kung-Fu Master, an
unofficial sequel to the film Kung-Fu Panda. The film features the
character of martial-arts folk hero Wong Fei Hung, whom Tsui had
paid tribute to in the series of films Once Upon a Time in
China.