Intermission

A brilliant feast for the eyes, Yonfan’s Intermission distills the essential meaning of cinema as the collective experience of pursuing a dream by following a beam of white light projected onto a screen in a darkened space.

Neither a documentary nor a conventional film-on-film essay — and conceived almost like a musical compilation — Intermission draws from the wealth of beauty, elegance, and the extraordinary constellation of stars populating Yonfan’s 15 films spanning nearly 40 years. 

Maggie Cheung, Sylvia Chang, Chow Yun Fat, Cherie Chung, Daniel Wu, Shu Qi, Stephen Fung, Rie Miyazawa, and many others are captured at defining moments in their careers which collectively made Yonfan’s cinema so singular.

Here, he creates a cinematic portrait of his work and an alternative history of Hong Kong cinema shaped by his unmistakable artistic vision. Images, music, dance, and memory flow into one another through virtuoso editing evoking the graceful, circular movement of tai chi: beginnings become endings, and every ending opens onto another dream.

The romanticism and complex female protagonists of his early works, and the later explorations of queer desire, eroticism, social marginality, and artistic liberation, all gather in Intermission, a meeting place where intimacy and spectacle, memory, and fantasy coexist in harmony.

Intermission resists easy classification. It is at once memoir, reverie, and act of preservation and an exquisitely fluid celebration of cinema itself, of the vanished faces, places, and desires that continue to live whenever light reaches the screen.

GIOVANNA FULVI