Hong Kong movies strike a core with Big Apple audiences

Hong Kong filmmakers may fret about their box office, but they can rest assured of one thing - they're hot tickets in New York. 'All the Hong Kong films sold out completely,' says Grady Hendrix, who organises the yearly New York Asian Film Festival, with three friends. 'There were lines all around the block, and everyone seemed really impressed by what they saw.'

Like Italy's Udine Far East Film Festival, the New York show focuses on commercial, rather than art house. Hendrix shows about 20 films each year in the musty Anthology Film Archives, the city's home for underground cinema. This year (the festival's third), swordfighting epics and comedies from South Korea rubbed shoulders with horrors from Japan, and an eclectic selection from Hong Kong and the mainland.

Infernal Affairs and Zhang Yimou's Hero - which still hasn't been released in the US - stole the show in a programme that included Johnnie To Kei-fung's well-regarded Running on Karma.

Infernal Affairs was a show-stopper. 'People really liked it,' Hendrix says. 'If you see it together with Infernal Affairs 2, they make up the best crime series to come out of any country for a long while. I think it's the best crime film since Michael Mann made Heat [1995].

'The production values are high enough that an American audience doesn't find anything to laugh at or make fun of, like they do with some Hong Kong films. They're completely drawn inside the story. It's a real Philip K. Dick kind of concept. It's surprising no one thought of it before.'

Hero, which Hendrix describes as 'turgid, but beautiful' also went down well - although, as in Hong Kong, audiences were worried by the film's authoritarian political message. 'They liked it, but they didn't like the politics,' he says. 'They're aware of the one China policy, and everyone was really down on that aspect of it when they came out of the screening. But they enjoyed the way it looks, and everybody though that Jet Li Lin-kit performed really well.'