Cine Fan Sep/Oct 2026 Programme
The Hong Kong International Film Festival's Cine Fan programme will present a special focus on Clint Eastwood in September and October, tracing the evolution of his tough, laconic screen persona and his distinctive achievements behind the camera. The programme also features a retrospective of Ritwik Ghatak, celebrated as one of India's greatest directors.
Best known for his tough-guy roles as the Man with No Name and Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood has also built one of modern cinema's most disciplined directing careers. His films are characterised by economy, restraint and moral ambiguity, often questioning heroism, institutions and personal codes.
Titled ‘Clint Eastwood: A Hero Deconstructed’, the programme presents ten major works directed by Eastwood. Among them are three landmark revisionist Westerns: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven, the Oscar-winning Best Picture that also earned Eastwood the Best Director award.
Eastwood's work beyond the Western is equally wide-ranging. The selection includes Bird, his biopic of jazz innovator Charlie Parker; The Bridges of Madison County, the romantic drama in which he stars opposite Meryl Streep; and Mystic River, the film noir that earned Sean Penn and Tim Robbins the Oscars for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Million Dollar Baby, another career peak, won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, with Hilary Swank named Best Actress. The audience will also have a chance to watch Eastwood's final directorial work, Juror #2, which has never been shown in Hong Kong cinemas.
The programme also includes Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — the iconic Spaghetti Westerns that launched Eastwood as an international star.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ritwik Ghatak's death. Though less widely recognised internationally, Ghatak stands alongside Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen as one of India's major filmmakers. His cinema combines political critique, emotional intensity and daring formal experimentation.
The retrospective, Across the River of Sorrow: The Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak, showcases five essential works. At its centre is the Partition Trilogy — The Cloud-Capped Star, E-Flat and The Golden Line — which blends melodrama, folklore, mythology, music, realism and modernist aesthetics to portray displacement, fractured families and enduring trauma after the Partition of Bengal. Also featured are The Runaway, often compared with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows for its view of the world through a child's eyes, and A River Called Titas, which expands personal tragedy into a reflection on historical upheaval and cultural loss.
Cine Fan's Golden Age section features two major works by John Ford. How Green Was My Valley, a lyrical family drama and an Eastwood favourite, famously won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1942 over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne and James Stewart, deconstructs the Western hero myth that Ford helped define and that later influenced Leone in the Dollars Trilogy.
The line-up is completed by two restored Japanese classics from the 1990s: Iwai Shunji’s Swallowtail Butterfly and Morita Yoshimitsu’s Lost Paradise, starring Yakusho Koji and Kuroki Hitomi. Both films lend the edition a distinctive romantic sensibility.
The full programme and schedule for Cine Fan's September/October edition are available at https://cinefan.com.hk. Tickets for all screenings will go on sale via URBTIX from 26 August.
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