Happy Together

Winner of Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Happy Together portrays the intricacies of a disintegrating love affair between two men, Ho Po-wing and Lai Yiu-fai, played by two of Hong Kong’s most beloved superstar actors, Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, respectively. As the duo travel, split, and reunite while traveling in Argentina, their relationship becomes caught in a feverish cycle of infatuation and destruction. The turbulence of their bond parallels the film’s color palette, alternating jarringly between monochrome and saturated color in an unsettling expression of the complexities of human relationships.

Chungking Express

Another cinematic masterpiece by Wong Kar-wai, Chungking Express lovingly builds a singular world in which the audience can submerge and daydream. The film centers on various unfolding stories amidst a buzzing 1990s Hong Kong, involving two policemen named 223 and 663 (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung), an eccentric café clerk Faye (Faye Wong), and an enigmatic blonde drug smuggler (Brigitte Lin). Against Wong’s characteristically lush visuals and electrifying melancholy, each character exists like a floating planet, detached from the crowded city—when their paths cross, a contradicting sense of belonging and solace is born.