For an event running annually for 32 years, the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) managed to pull off a nice surprise at its most recent press conference on Wednesday.

As singer Sammi Cheng Sau-man and director Ann Hui On-wah were about to unveil this year's festival trailer, 200 students rushed across the stage as if in a mad dash to buy tickets. The audience and stars were not sure what was going on. After a few seconds, they all came back on stage with tickets in their hands, surrounded the two celebrities and yelled for people to buy theirs quickly. It turned out to be a staged flash mob for the festival, whose Chinese slogan is 'make a beeline to the HKIFF ticket counters'.

Hui, whose latest drama, The Way We Are, about the lives of Tin Shui Wai residents, will premiere on March 29, was left giddy by the students. But she recovered enough to give us her picks for the year. 'My number one choice is Wang Bing's documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir,' Hui said. 'I have always been a fan of his documentaries. I am also very into this year's selections of Israeli and Czech films. There are just too many, I can't name them all.'