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By the time of The Sword’s release in 1980, the wuxia genre had begun to fall out of favor in the Hong Kong in favor of kung-fu movies and more contemporary-set action films that would define the province’s genre cinema for the next two decades. In many ways, Patrick Tam’s film, with its blend of melodrama, weapons-based action, and wire-fu choreography, is a throwback to the genre’s heyday. Nonetheless, the director, a leading figure of what would become the Hong Kong New Wave, complicates the story with an emotional dimension rare to even the most florid wuxia of years past.

The Sword opens with the forging of a mystical blade for a legendary swordsman, Fa Chin-shu (Tien Feng), who’s warned by the blacksmith that the weapon will ultimately be his undoing. The action then shifts to a far younger warrior, Lee Mak-yin (Adam Cheng), who sets...

Beginning Friday, March 22, a new 2K restoration of My Heart Is That Eternal Rose, Patrick Tam's underseen and visually daring late-80s action-romance, opens for a one-week NY exclusive theatrical run at Metrograph In Theater.

Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave's most daring cine-modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar-wai, teams with Dp Christopher Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, for a high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection between Wong's cinema of longing and John Woo's cinema of wrathful vengeance. One of the unheralded masterworks of Hong Kong filmmaking. A Kani Releasing release.

The digitization and restoration of My Heart is...

HONG KONG -- New Wave auteur Patrick Tam's comeback film After This Our Exile was the winner of the night at the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards, scooping five trophies, including best film, director and screenplay.

However, the film's lead actor, Aaron Kwok, lost to local favorite Lau Ching-Wan.

In his acceptance speech for best director, Tam thanked the film's investors for the creative freedom they had given him, a lack of which had led him to stop directing after 1989's My Heart Is That Eternal Rose. He also thanked Law Kar, one of the first generation of Hong Kong film scholars, betraying his own roots as a critic.

Exile's young star Gouw Ian Iskandar won supporting actor and new performer. He received supporting actor honors in November at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan.

The other hot title of the night was Zhang Yimou's $45 million period epic Curse of the Golden Flower. Gong Li, who made her career in Zhang's earliest films and who was working with the director for the eighth time, took best actress.

The film also won art direction and original film song, which was sung by Taiwanese pop sensation Jay Chou.

HONG KONG -- Veteran Hong Kong director Patrick Tam Ka-Ming has emerged from his own self-imposed exile to helm the $3 million After This Our Exile. Tam, one of Hong Kong's top "new wave" directors of the 1970s, has not directed a film since 1989's My Heart Is That Eternal Rose. An assistant professor of creative studies at a local university, Tam also is one of Hong Kong's leading film editors and has won editing awards for his work on Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time. Exile, which is in production in Malaysia, is a coming-of-age story about the tumultuous relationship between a young boy and his abusive father and comes from a script that Tam had been working on with one of his students for six years.