"The jianghu underworld filled with crouching tigers and hidden dragons, but so are human feelings." - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
"From now on, we're friends of one minute." - Days of Being Wild
"If I were a girl, would you want to marry me?" - The Love Eterne (1963). The Chinese folk legend of the Butterfly Lovers may have been adapted many times, but with this film's poetic lyrics and colorful scheme, it may be the best adaptation both historically and artistically. The film tells the story of a young scholar who chances upon an aristocratic daughter who attends a male-only school disguised as a boy. The two become sworn brothers and spend three years together as classmates. However, when she reveals her true identity, they decide to get married. Their plan is halted by her father who had planned to marry her off to a rich family.
"I'm not showing them I'm the best. I just want to tell them I can take back what I've lost." - A Better Tomorrow (1986) directed by John Woo. The director explains how he first came up with the now-customary tradition of double-pistol shooting in the action movie genre? "When I was preparing for a scene in A Better Tomorrow, where Chow Yun-fat has to take on a large group of people, I asked Chow to use two pistols at the same time to produce the musical rhythm of drum beats and the damages of a machine gun."
"Why don't you photograph the sea and the clouds? People are so ugly." - Boat People, directed by Ann Hui . this is one of the most important films in Hong Kong cinema. This political thriller centers around a Japanese photojournalist (Lam) who revisits the post-Liberation Vietnam in 1987 to document its rebirth The film reveals the horrors facing the people living in the port of Danang, who are sent to forced labour camps that are misguidedly labelled as "new economic zones." The film forecasts the fate of Hong Kong after 1997, an interpretation not weakened by the Chinese authorities' view of it as an "anti-communist" work. The film was selected in competition at Cannes Film Festival. "At some point, we were asked to negotiate with the (authorities) in Paris, and were told that we couldn't be included in the (main) competition anymore," Hui recalls. "We were still given the status of ‘official selection', (but were instead) presented there as the ‘film surprise'. And they told me that the preceding ‘film surprise,‘ which was also prevented by the government (from competing), was Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. At that point, I was so smitten I just said yes."
"I believe we wouldn't be like them. I was wrong." - In the Mood for Love (2000). "He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could use, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct." And so the great Hong Kong film ends with a quotation from writer Liu Yi-Chang's stream-of-consciousness novella, Intersection, which loosely inspired Wong Kar-wai into capturing the tentative affair between two potential lovers who cross paths briefly before parting forever.