Hong Kong's film restorers work tirelessly in tough conditions to bring back to life Cantonese classics
Professionals face a challenging time in a hot and humid environment to ensure they can restore much-loved movies from yesteryear
Bede Cheng Tze-wang should have known what was coming once he turned his professional attention to restoring old films.
Cheng had been delighted on so many occasions as a film fan, growing up and going to festivals where he’d often stumble on rarities or productions once thought lost, or simply forgotten.
Time spent as a festival programmer would have prepared him for what was ahead, but there was a major surprise at the Hong Kong International Film Festival this year, when he saw a new generation introduced to a fully restored 4K version of director John Woo’s classic thriller from 1986, A Better Tomorrow. The audience was quite simply blown away.
“It was a film that affected a whole generation of Hong Kong people,” Cheng says. “It seemed to have captured a point in time for them and many got to see it on the big screen for the first time. A lot of people told me just how special that experience was.”
Cinema often captures a specific moment in time, and that’s what has made the restoration so important.
Jaeger-LeCoultre is among the corporate supporters to have thrown its weight behind the work, helping the annual Shanghai International Film Festival preserve Chinese cinema classics from the 1930s and 1940s, including Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli’s A Spring River Flows East from 1947 to Zhang Yimou’s Hero from 2002.
