Paris Hong Kong Film Festival Builds a “Behind the Action” Strand Around Stephen Tung Wai

• The Paris Hong Kong Film Festival runs November 13–17, 2026, in Paris.
• A strand built around action director Stephen Tung Wai screens two of his films.
• Stuntwoman Maryline Vo co-hosts the strand with critic Frédéric Ambroisine.

Posted: September 8, 2026

The Paris Hong Kong Film Festival returns for a fifth edition on November 13–17, 2026, and the line worth reading on the programme is not the opening night title but a dedicated strand called Behind the Action: Hong Kong Action Cinema, built around the work of action director Stephen Tung Wai. Retrospectives usually hang on a director or a star; hanging one on the person who designed the fights is still rare enough to be worth noting, and the two films chosen make the argument on craft terms rather than nostalgia.

The strand screens John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Wong Kar-Wai’s As Tears Go By (1988) — two pictures with very different action grammars from the same action department. The first is the template for the Hong Kong gunfight as a choreographed set piece: sustained two-gun work staged for continuous coverage, squib and blood-gag timing carrying the impact where the edit would otherwise have to, and performers running reload and repositioning beats that read as character. The second is the opposite discipline — short, ugly, handheld street brawls where the choreography’s job is to look unrehearsed while still protecting the performers through contact that the camera is sitting on top of. Programming them side by side is a straightforward way to show that “action director” is a design credit, not a stunt-delivery one.

The strand is co-hosted by stuntwoman and filmmaker Maryline Vo alongside critic and documentarian Frédéric Ambroisine, whose CinéFlamme label comes on as media partner — a working stunt professional in the room rather than only critics, which usually changes what gets asked about a sequence. The festival is curated by founder Lok Kan Cheung through CUBE [C³] in partnership with Kenneth Yeung, screens at Cinéma Club de l’Étoile and Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris under the theme “Hong Kong: Intertwined Destinies,” and opens with Herman Yau’s We’re Nothing At All, with an “Asian Trajectories” shorts block alongside the main slate.

Source: Film Combat Syndicate — The Paris Hong Kong Film Festival Returns For Its Fifth Year In November!

Learn more on IMDb: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Stephen Tung Wai