Peking Opera Blues - WFS Film Fest screening - members only booking

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BOOKING DETAILS

To book, you must have a valid full year membership to the Wellington Film Society. You can book up to two seats per film - but all attendees must be valid full year members. We are making half the seats in the theatre bookable. The rest of the seats will be available on the day on a 'first come, first served' basis.

If you have a three film sampler membership, you cannot book in advance. You can attend screenings on the ‘first come, first served’ basis for the remaining seats. We will clip your card for each screening you attend. Bring a buddies are not valid.

Your membership must be valid at the time of booking, and also at the time of the screening in June. If you need to renew during this time, make sure you do so via our website - https://wellingtonfilms.nz

You must book through Humanitix using the same name and email as your Wellington Film Society membership, in order to enable cross-referencing.

Places are bookable per film rather than for the whole festival – so you can pick what you want to see.  We’ll be clearing and cleaning the theatre between films so you’ll need to leave, just like between our usual Monday 6 and 8:30 screenings. Seating will be unallocated for all screenings, as normal.

On the day of the screening, we will check both your Humanitix booking via a QR code, and your Film Society membership.

Please be on time, If you are not, we may give your booking away to members who are waiting. Please be seated in the cinema five minutes before the screening time. After that point we do not guarantee your booking is valid.

FILM DETAILS

Representing the 1980s in our celebration of Wellington Film Society’s history is Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues. With three very serious films from Hong Kong in our main programme, we couldn’t resist throwing this absolute romp into the mix.

In Peking Opera Blues, it’s three very different women who have to ‘play the part’: a revolutionary (Brigitte Lin), a courtesan (Cherie Chung) and an aspiring Peking Opera performer (Sally Yeh). The trio find themselves embroiled in political intrigue with the opportunity to influence the course of 20th century Chinese history. The fact that female roles in Peking Opera were traditionally played by men is an excuse for Tsui and his cast to have a lot of fun with gender roles, especially Lin – who spends most of the film in male drag.

Ostensibly part of the same heroic bloodshed movement as John Woo (and Ringo Lam), Tsui notably forgoes the hyper-masculinity of his peers. Tsui’s action scenes offer the same ecstatic pleasure as Woo’s – this film’s outstanding final set piece is a perfect example – the only difference is he lets women in on the heroic fun.

“There’s no better introduction to the cinema of Tsui Hark than his 1986 masterpiece Peking Opera Blues, a film that seems to draw from all manner of Chinese cultural touchstones to create a wholly unique, breathtakingly constructed confection […] Describing it as a period action-comedy does little justice to its seamless blending of tones, or Tsui’s facility for hurtling movement through the multi-levelled planes of its hermetic sets.” – Matthew Thrift, Where to Begin with Tsui Hark, BFI