Don’t Play With Fire – New Restoration
- Tuesday, Sep 29, 2026, 7:15pm
- Wednesday, Sep 30, 2026, 7:15pm
Screening location: SIFF Film Center – 167 Republican St, Seattle(located within the Seattle Center, just north of Climate Pledge Arena / east of KEXP and The Vera Project)
Long difficult to find, Tsui Hark's DON'T PLAY WITH FIRE (aka DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS OF THE FIRST KIND) is one of the most controversial and violent crime films from the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s. Now newly restored!
After a fatal hit-and-run, three high school friends flee the crime scene. They are witnessed by Pearl, a sadistic young girl who pursues the group and blackmails them into more crimes, with increasingly disastrous consequences.
In Cantonese with English subtitles.
Special live intro from local Hong Kong genre film connoisseur and one of the programmers of the Seattle Film Society, Patrick McFarland.
“No film captures [Tsui Hark’s] early renegade style better.” Stephanie Monohan, Screen Slate
“An unflinching, nihilistic examination of juvenile delinquency in an unstable political climate, [it] still holds up more than three decades on, both as a piece of entertainment and as a cautionary tale about the dangers of a disenfranchised young generation.” James Marsh, ScreenAnarchy