Days of Being Wild

Friday, September 9 - Thursday, October 20, 2022

4K restoration!

Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough sophomore feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. The first film in a loosely connected, ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046, this ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twenty-somethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a cycle of frustrated desire. The director’s inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the film its gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a never-realized sequel, Days of Being Wild is an exhilarating first expression of Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing, dislocation, and the restless search for human connection. A Janus Films release.

Screening as part of our retrospective The World of Wong Kar Wai, from August 26 – September 15, 2022.. Discounted ticket packs available in 3-packs ($42 for general, $30 for IFC Center Members) and 5-packs ($60 for general, $45 for IFC Center Members) here.

  • Language In Cantonese with English subtitles
  • Year 1990
  • Running Time 95 minutes
  • Distributor Janus
  • Director Wong Kar Wai
  • Accessibility Assistive Listening, T-Coil

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