M+ Cinema winter edition

M+ Cinema welcomes the new year with a thought-provoking thematic programme examining our relationship to the world around us. From Signal to Screen: Reflections on Shanshui features eight screenings that extend the M+ Collection exhibition Shanshui: Echoes and Signals. The film programme meditates on the complex connections between humans and the contemporary landscape. It also explores the relationship between stillness and motion, vision and imagination, the immediacy of experience and the persistence of historical memory. Highlights include Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Masahiro Shinoda’s Himiko (1974), Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992), Park Chan-kyong’s Belated Bosal (2019), and Hong Kong artist and farmer Lo Lai Lai’s live performance Resilient Echoes (2026).  

To accompany the exhibition Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time opening on February 14 2026, M+ Cinema will present two documentaries on the late Ryuichi Sakamoto. CODA (2017), directed by Stephen Nomura Schible, captures Sakamoto’s ingenious creativity and tireless perseverance as a composer and musician. OPUS (2023), directed by Neo Sora and filmed mere months before Sakamoto succumbed to cancer in March 2023, is a black-and-white concert film featuring twenty songs spanning an illustrious career. 

The special screening of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Linda Linda Linda (2025), transforms a slice of high school life into a breezy musical adventure. As part of Lunar New Year Special, the cinema spotlights Tsui Hark’s Cantonese classic The Chinese Feast (1995). Tsui cleverly transforms a cooking competition into a martial arts showdown, reimagining the culinary world as rival wuxia sects. With his signature cinematic flair and boundless creativity, he elevates a simple cooking contest into a suspense-filled story.  

This iteration of Rediscoveries is dedicated to those on the margins of society, whose destinies shift with the tides of change. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) follows the title character, a poor Irish country boy, as he navigates ambition and adversity across Europe. Shohei Imamura’s Eijanaika (1981) depicts the peasant Genji amid the turbulent end of the Edo period. Both 35mm projections exemplify the directors’ stunning cinematography, innovative techniques, and monumental scenes. M+ Cinema remains Hong Kong’s sole cinema to regularly screen 35mm prints and will continue to expand its programme to invite audiences to rediscover the magic of celluloid.

Stair in the Dark—Big Leap Forward delves into ever darker cult classics, including William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977) and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981). The theme of this programme continues to spotlight filmmakers who dare to take a leap into the unknown, capturing the fear, excitement, and confrontation that arise from it. These titles reveal how expectations, archetypes, and preferences have shaped and continue to influence film culture. 

Art at the Stair is an exhibition series presented at the Grand Stair, showcasing moving image works of outstanding contemporary makers. ENDO EXO (2024) and PHOSPHENES (2024) draw upon Carsten Nicolai’s collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and feature soundtracks from Sakamoto’s final studio album, 12 (2023). Inspired by Jules Verne’s science fiction novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the works are two of the twenty-four chapters in Nicolai’s film project 20,000 (2014–2024). ENDO EXO contemplates the human impulse to collect, catalogue, and preserve once-living creatures. PHOSPHENES takes its name from the shimmering, fluid shapes you see when you close your eyes. Nicolai uses a quiet, minimalist visual language to represent this experience of inner light and colour, and to explore the boundaries between dream and reality, consciousness and unconsciousness.

M+’s contemporary artist series Avant-Garde Now offers original perspectives with its theme Hidden Spaces, leading up to next year’s Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival in May 2026. In this edition, invited artists including Lee Kai Chung, He Zike, Samuel Swope, and YoungEun Kim will present works that gesture toward the unseen depths of our collective psyche, the hidden narratives of the past, and uncertain speculations of the future.