Tony Leung Chiu-wai has collaborated with major directors including Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Johnnie To, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou. He appears in Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, where characters interact with a single German ginkgo tree across three years: 1908, 1972, and 2020. Leung plays a neuroscientist in the final period whose newborn brain activity research is interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During his time in the setting, he grows attached to the nearly 200-year-old tree and seeks a relationship between his own neurological activity and the ginkgo’s. Leung’s career began as a children’s TV co-host in 1982 and expanded through diverse film and television genres, with notable roles in A City of Sadness, In the Mood for Love, and Infernal Affairs. His acting is marked by commitment, empathy, and a distinctive penetrating gaze shaped by a difficult childhood.
"Most recently, he appeared in Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi's Silent Friend, which finds characters interacting with a single German ginkgo tree in three disparate years: 1908, 1972, and 2020. Leung plays a neuroscientist during the final third, whose research on newborn brain activity is halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During this professional sojourn, he becomes fond of the nearly 200-year-old tree and tries to find a link between his own neurological activity and the ginkgo's."
"Beginning as the co-host of a children's TV show back in 1982, Leung worked his way up to leading roles in television and film projects. He has starred in every conceivable genre: romance, comedy, horror, sci-fi, crime, thriller, fantasy, and some of the most memorable dramas of the last forty years, with his roles in A City of Sadness, In the Mood for Love, and Infernal Affairs among his most iconic."
"From reporter to policeman, smuggler, informer, real-estate tycoon, photographer, gambler, bounty hunter, neuroscientist, Leung brings a commitment and empathy to all his roles. His penetrating gaze is one of the most distinctive aspects of Leung's performing style. "People talk about his eyes," Enyedi noted. "He said it may be due to his childhood, which was painful, difficult. He had to learn to hide his feelings, to isolate himself.""
"Leung, who had not been to New York to promote a film in almost 25 years, spent time in the city to support a retrospective of his work at Film at Lincoln Center and to attend screenings of his movie Silent Friend, which hit theaters on May 8 via 1-2 Special. We spoke ahead of the film's US release and briefly at the Busan International Film Festival last Septembe"
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]