Romancing in Thin Air
- Tuesday, Dec 8, 2026, 7:00pm
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)
Highly-prolific HK action auteur Johnnie To (ELECTION, DRUG WAR, THE MISSION) is also known for a plethora of romantic melodramas. This subgenre is an East Asian cinematic staple, and ROMANCING IN THIN AIR is one of the very best in its class: touching, sweet, and deeply melancholic; a powerful and moving meditation on loss, grief, and the power of cinema itself. Presented in a new HD digital transfer.
Movie star icon Michael (Louis Koo) sinks into a depression after being publicly dumped at the altar by his former fiancée. After embarking on a drunken bender, he is found in a mountain forest, lost and barely responsive, by Sue (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man), who runs the local guesthouse and is still grieving the loss of her husband, who mysteriously disappeared in the woods several years prior. As Sue slowly nurses Michael back to health and the pair learn more about their shared pasts, they embark on a journey to find catharsis in each other.
In Cantonese and Mandarin 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.
“One of the unsung, under-seen, great films of 2012… Romancing in Thin Air is memorable for its balancing of a commercial surface with the sort of dark side that used to beg to be discovered in the work of classical Hollywood greats like Douglas Sirk.” Adam Cook, MUBI