49th Hong Kong International Film Festival – PAID EVENT

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Celeste Dalla Porta, Stefania Sandrelli, Gary Oldman
Italy, France / 2024 / Italian, Neapolitan, English / 137 minutes / DCP / Colour

Director: Maura Delpero
Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberta Rovelli
Italy, France, Belgium / 2024 / Italian / 119 minutes / DCP / Colour

1944. The arrival of deserter Pietro in the alpine village of Vermiglio, as well as his growing affection for the eldest daughter of its schoolmaster and patriarch Cesare, creates a shift in the stern familial order. Bathed in winter light and set against a scenic mountain range, Delpero’s Vermiglio is a magnificently lensed, carefully paced, and impressively classical portrait of a family around wartime, offering a window into the past to address the traumas, as well as the structures, of faith, tradition, and duty that shaped Italian communities across the decades. Grand Jury Prize, Venice.

Director: Roberto Minervini
Cast: Jeremiah Knupp, Cuyler Ballenger, René W. Solomon, Noah Carlson
Italy, USA, Belgium, Canada / 2024 / English / 88 minutes / DCP / Colour

At the height of the American Civil War, a platoon of volunteer soldiers fighting for the North head for the western territories, where they soon lose sight of their objective. Chief among their growing concerns is how their violent actions conflict with their profound and treasured faith. Echoes of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line ripple throughout Minervini’s low budget period war film, as the men are entirely consumed by the vast expanses of wilderness and woodland, which threaten to obscure from view any vestiges of recognisable civilisation.

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili
Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze
France, Italy, Georgia / 2024 / Georgian / 134 minutes / DCP / Colour

This poignant abortion drama from the Georgian filmmaker is a deeply unsettling rumination on sexuality and transgression, following her feature debut Beginning (45th). Performing illegal abortions for desperate women, an obstetrician’s career is put at risk when a rare stillbirth threatens to expose her secret. Unfolding with the breathtaking tension of a thriller, interspersed with sequences of eerie silence, the Venice Special Jury Prize winner delves into one woman’s repressed psyche of sexual dysfunction within a patriarchal society, as though haunted by a contorted beast.

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman
Italy, USA / 2024 / English / 135 minutes / DCP / Colour

Throttling his Bond charisma, Daniel Craig inhabits another dimension of seductive, damaged charm. In Guadagnino’s soft-serve adaptation of the Beat Generation writer’s autobiographical novella, Craig’s Lee is a dissolute American expat living indolently in Mexico City, intoxicating himself with alcohol, heroin, and above all, a fervent obsession with a good-looking boy, alongside the pain of unrequited love. Spiralling from a trippy road comedy with explicit eroticism into a surreal drama about the search for mind-altering transcendence, the film is ultimately a fulfilment of queer love and Craig’s winning vulnerability.

*Queer has been rated as a category III film and can only be viewed by persons over the age of 18.

Director: Peter Kerekes
Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria / 2024 / Italian, Friulian / 99 minutes / DCP / Colour