Johnnie To's Cannes hit to open eclectic summer film festival

The line-up for this year's Summer International Film Festival has just been announced, with Johnnie To Kei-fung's Cannes hit Vengeance grabbing the opening-night slot. The Hong Kong director's collaboration with French rocker Johnny Hallyday (above) will lead a roster of more than 35 films from across the cinematic spectrum scheduled to begin screening on August 5.

Presented by the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society, the annual festival wraps up on September 7 with a quirky US romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.

In between, there are festival-circuit hits (the Philippines' Cannes best director Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay and Oscar best documentary Man on Wire), a tribute to Japanese auteur Ichikawa Jun, a few Taiwanese classics (Hou Hsiao-Hsien's City of Sadness, Edward Yang De-chang's A Brighter Summer Day and Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman - which for some reason isn't considered in the Taiwanese classic section), and new movies by cinematic big names like Jim Jarmusch, Claude Chabrol, Tom Tykwer and Sam Mendes.

In honour of the late Wouter Barendrecht, the Hong Kong-based founder of Fortissimo Films, the festival will also screen several key productions that his company backed (Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata and Tian Zhuangzhuang's Springtime in a Small Town).

There are two Japanese films with the kind of wildly imaginative names that you can't help but be curious about. We're already thinking about buying tickets for The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. Don't they sound like instant cult classics?

Tickets go on sale on Friday at Urbtix outlets. The hotline is 2734 9009.