• A marathon session of Wong Kar-wai’s Love Trilogy
• Three special co-presentations including a Documentary Filmmakers’ Roundtable, presented in collaboration with the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF)
• Hong Kong premiere of psychological thriller Eileen starring Oscar winner Anne Hathaway
• Late filmmaker Agnès Varda and rebel photographer Robert Mapplethorpe featured in a ‘Makers and Making’ in response to M+’s new Special Exhibition The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography
• Cult classics Spring Breakers and Trainspotting presented as part of the ‘Eye Tunes’ series in ‘Stair in the Dark’

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, is pleased to announce the M+ Cinema Spring Edition, to be presented from March to June 2024. Tickets for the major programmes will go on sale from Monday, 11 March 2024. M+ Patrons, Affiliates and Members can enjoy priority ticket purchase with a twenty per cent discount from Friday, 8 March 2024 and redeem tickets using the M+ Cinema Screening Redemption Vouchers. These two offers are not applicable to M+ x HKIFF Co-Presentation programmes.

Spring Edition Highlights

Since opening to the public on 8 June 2022, M+ Cinema has offered diverse viewing experiences and enriching encounters with visual culture. This season, M+ Cinema celebrates its second anniversary with a marathon session of Wong Kar-wai’s Love Trilogy: Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004), among which Days of Being Wild was one the opening films of M+ Cinema’s inaugural edition. Psychological thriller Eileen starring Oscar winner Anne Hathaway will make its Hong Kong premiere exclusively at M+, while ‘Eye Tunes’ brings cult classics capturing adolescent life. To complement the new Special Exhibition opening on 16 March 2024, ‘Makers and Making’ follows late filmmaker Agnès Varda in her collaboration with artist JR in Faces Places, and explores the work of rebel photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures.

M+ Cinema also presents an array of dynamic public programmes in this Spring Edition, joining hands with the 48th HKIFF to host a Documentary Filmmakers’ Roundtable. With an emphasis on still photography within film production, the live event Hong Kong Made Me by Canadian photographer Greg Girard, in collaboration with iconic experimental rock band Gong Gong Gong, fuses evocative photographs with archival materials from local filmmakers.

Details of the M+ Cinema Spring Edition are as follows:

• M+ x HKIFF Co-Presentation

M+ and the 48th HKIFF join hands for three special co-presentations. Indian filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s The World is Family (2023) and Surrealist pioneer Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1923–1928) are both screened with post-screening talks, while 'Documentary Ethics, Aesthetics, and Education – A Roundtable with Veteran Documentarians’ featuring Pfatwardhan, Japanese filmmaker Soda Kazuhiro, and Hong Kong filmmaker Ruby Yang explores the philosophies and practices of Asian documentarians.

• Greg Girard: Hong Kong Made Me

This live event features Canadian photographer Greg Girard, whose evocative work has captured the transformation of Hong Kong over several decades. Combining his own photography with archival materials from local makers and a live sound by experimental rock duo Gong Gong Gong, Hong Kong Made Me is a celebration of the largely overlooked artistry of still photography within film production that was instrumental in establishing a globally recognisable visual language for 1980s Hong Kong cinema.

• Previews: I Want to Be a Plastic Chair (2023), Okiku and the World (2023) and Eileen (2023)

‘Previews’ features keenly awaited local and foreign films. I Want to Be a Plastic Chair, a Macau dark comedy by Ao leong Weng-fong, starring Hong Kong musician-actor Wong Hin Yan, will make its Hong Kong premiere at M+ Cinema. Okiku and the World by Junji Sakamoto finds love and squalor in the lives of a young woman and two ‘manure men’ in Edo-period Japan. An M+ exclusive, the psychological thriller Eileen by William Oldroyd starring Anne Hathaway follows a woman whose mundane daily life as a prison clerk is about to be turned upside down by the arrival of a new psychologist.

• Special Screening

Located at the intersection of video games and film are two cult favourites. Released at the height of the game’s popularity in the 1990s, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994) contains dazzling action sequences that have continuously wowed anime and gaming fans alike. On the other hand, the live-action adaptation of the iconic Super Mario Bros. (1993) was widely ridiculed at the time of its release but has subsequently found a devoted audience. Recently restored in 4K, this outlandish relic starring Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper is a must-see for cult film lovers.

• Afterimage

This season’s ‘Afterimage’ demonstrates the power of moving image in challenging and shaping historical memory. Chen Chieh-Jen’s elegiac film Military Court and Prison (2007–2008) depicts an imagined reality of a real-life event where a Taiwanese military detention centre of political prisoners was transformed into a human rights memorial. Shohei Imamura’s In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia (1971) documents the lives of Japanese soldiers who chose to remain in Malaysia after World War II. In her influential debut film Reassemblage (1982), filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha trains her lens on rural Senegal and questions the relationship between the filmmaker, the subjects, and the spectator in ethnographic cinema.

• Makers and Making

Featuring intimate and insightful documentaries, ‘Makers and Making’ taps into the creative minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Complementing the new Special Exhibition The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography at M+, this season features two films exploring photography. Faces Places (2017) follows the unlikely friendship of the co-directors, late filmmaker Agnès Varda and street artist and photographer JR. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016) explores the provocative and impactful work of the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

• Fresh Eyes

This edition of ‘Fresh Eyes’ offers a heartwarming cinematic sanctuary for cat lovers for all ages. Viewers are invited to wander along the streets of Istanbul with seven stray cats in Kedi (2016) and take leaps and bounds over Paris rooftops with the Academy Award–nominated hand-drawn animation A Cat in Paris (2010). Selected sessions are offered as ‘relaxed screenings’ to provide comfortable viewing conditions for children, with concession tickets priced at only HKD 25.

• Rediscoveries

The recurring series ‘Rediscoveries’ brings back forgotten gems and restored classics. Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay captivated the Cannes Film Festival with her stunning debut Ratcatcher (1999), an unassuming story of youth set in 1970s Glasgow, while famed screenwriter Wai Ka-fai’s directorial debut Peace Hotel (1995) is a Western set in 1921 Shanghai, starring Chow Yun-fat and Cecilia Yip.

• Stair in the Dark

‘Stair in the Dark’ presents ‘Eye Tunes’, an ongoing film series shown at the Grand Stair featuring musical films amplified by unforgettable melodies and captivating scores. This season highlights cult classics exploring rebellious adolescence. Four masked, bikini-clad girls and a white man with cornrows hit the streets in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012). New Queer Cinema auteur Gregg Araki takes an ensemble of 1990s young stars through the strange highs and lows of adolescence in Nowhere (1997), while Danny Boyle’s breakout hit Trainspotting (1996) is a cultural touchstone for wasted youth featuring phenomenal pop music.

• Second Anniversary Screening

The 4K restoration of Days of Being Wild (1990) was one of the opening films of M+ Cinema’s inaugural edition in 2022. To celebrate the second anniversary of M+ Cinema, the restored versions of Wong Kar-wai’s Love Trilogy—Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004)—will be shown on the big screen in a marathon session.

‘Afterimage’ and ‘Rediscoveries’ are supported by CHANEL, M+’s Major Partner. For M+ Cinema’s details and ticketing and programme information, please visit the M+ website.

Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival

From 30 May to 2 June 2024, M+ will host the inaugural Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival. This four-day festival highlights the exceptional moving image practices of individuals and film communities that have defined Asia’s rich artistic landscape over the past six decades. The festival embraces independent art and filmmaking communities across Asia, spotlighting groundbreaking makers such as Nick Deocampo, Ellen Pau, Zhang Peili, Wing Shya, Wong Ping, and more. An exciting line-up of screenings, performances, talks, and workshops will be hosted during the festival, including guided viewings of exhibitions Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Primitive and Shanshui: Echoes and Signals. The Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival is supported by CHANEL, M+’s Major Partner. Further information on the programme and ticketing will be available in April 2024.

M+ Membership

M+’s annual membership and patron membership offer exclusive experiences of contemporary visual culture for people of all ages and backgrounds. Members across all tiers can enjoy priority ticket purchase with twenty per cent discount for selected cinema screenings, two free cinema redemption vouchers per membership year, and free exclusive screenings. Other membership benefits include unlimited free access to General Admission exhibitions, invitations to selected exhibition previews, exclusive access to the M+ Lounge, M+ Private Viewing, exclusive events, and more. For more information, please visit the M+ website.

About M+

M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District

The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.