Beijing Film Festival to Screen ‘The Angels’ Share’ and ‘The Nameless Gangster’

HONG KONG – The Beijing International Film Festival has unveiled its first screening selections for the event this year, which will take place across the capital’s 30 cinemas from April 15 to 23.

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The Angels’ Share, Ken Loach’s comedy about an ex-con finding his own footing in society through his ability to differentiate expensive whisky from cheaper blends, will be screened at the festival, alongside Hella W., a 2011 Finnish biopic of the playwright-businesswoman Hella Wuolijoki to whom the film’s director, Juha Wuolijoki, is distantly related.

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The third film revealed in the festival’s official statement is Nameless Gangster – Rules of the Time, Yoon Jong-bin’s epic chronicle of the rampant growth of the mob in the South Korean port city of Busan during the 1980s before the government’s crackdown on the underworld in the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, the festival will also screen Burnt by the Sun, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1994, and its sprawling critically-bashed 2010 sequel – which is itself divided into two installments titled Exodus and Citadel – as a tribute to the films’ director Nikita Mikhalkov, who would chair the jury for the festival’s Tiantan Award.

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Now into its third edition, the Beijing festival is held in parallel to a film market, which was slated to take place from April 20 to 22. No details have yet been made about guests attending the industry event, but it was largely expected that organizers will secure the presence of Hollywood heavyweights. Last year, James Cameron was in Beijing for the event, just as his 3-D re-release of Titanic was setting the country’s box offices alight.