Don’t Play with Fire: The Films of Tsui Hark

As director, producer, and creative engine of both the influential Cinema City Enterprises and Film Workshop production companies, the inexhaustible Tsui Hark has led many lives. He contributed crucially to codifying the “gun fu” genre in the A Better Tomorrow trilogy (helming the third picture) and to reviving the moribund wuxia in his Once Upon a Time in China I–III; he brought Hollywood FX to Hong Kong with his gonzo Gods and Monsters epic Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain and, with a little help from Jean-Claude Van Damme, even took a couple cracks at the English-language market himself. And back before any of this, Tsui was unquestionably the most fearsome figure associated with the Hong Kong New Wave, his third film, Don’t Play with Fire (aka Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind), a surly snarl of adolescent animus sliced to ribbons by shaken-up local censors. To accompany our run of the last-named film, newly restored with all its feral rage intact, we present a series celebrating the many facets of a fecund, frantically brilliant cineaste.