The East Asia Film Festival Ireland 2026 (EAFFI) is delighted to announce the programme for the tenth edition of the festival, taking place from Thursday, March 19th to Sunday, March 22nd at the Irish Film Institute (IFI). As always, this year offers a vibrant selection of screenings and events. Tickets are now on sale from www.ifi.ie.
The 10th EAFFI features independent filmmakers working across China, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore, opening new cinematic landscapes, and bringing fresh perspectives and ways of seeing.
This year, they are welcoming two special guests: to open the festival, Chinese filmmaker Agnis Shen Zhongmin will join us to take part in a Q&A session following the Irish premiere of her debut feature, Shanghai Daughter on Thursday, March 19th; Shanghai Daughter screened as part of the Panorama Section at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. On Saturday, March 21st, Chinese producer Ziyang Lin will take part in a Q&A session following the screening of Jianhang Chen’s docufiction The River that Holds our Hands.
Hong Kong in Focus:
The team behind the festival are thrilled to present a focus dedicated to Hong Kong cinema, celebrating its rich global legacy.
Three rare classic films will be presented in beautiful 4K digital restorations, each accompanied by an introduction, and all unmissable! Wong Tin-lam’s 1960 film The Wild, Wild Rose–one of the finest films in the history of Hong Kong cinema, is presented with the support of the Hong Kong Film Archives; Peter Yung’s 1979 film The System–a pioneering crime drama blending documentary-style realism and considered a key early entry of the Hong Kong New Wave, is presented with the support of M+ Restored; and John Woo’s 1989 classic The Killer–one of the most accomplished auteur works by Hong Kong action legend and iconic filmmaker John Woo.
A lecture by Prof. Chris Berry entitled Hong Kong’s Self-Reinventing Cinema, will take place at the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) on Friday, March 20th, in conversation with Irish film critic Tara Brady, and Hong Kong playwright and educator Pat to Yan – not to be missed! Booking link here.
A unique programme of short films by Hong Kong artist-filmmaker Simon Liu, in collaboration with aemi and ATRL, will take place at Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday, March 18th. See programme details on www.eaffi.ie and www.aemi.ie.
Speaking about this year’s East Asia Film Festival Ireland, Festival Curator Marie-Pierre Richard commented: This year’s programme brings together another rich selection of fiction, documentary, and essay films by independent filmmakers working across China, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore, opening new cinematic landscapes, and bringing fresh perspectives and ways of seeing. Exploring themes of displacement, migration, and both collective and personal journeys of identity, these films powerfully reflect on contemporary diasporic experience and places of origin, illuminating what connects us across borders. Together they reframe East Asian cinema as shaped by social, cultural and economic interactions, and the movement of people and ideas.
ON TOUR PROGRAMME: The 10th EAFFI On Tour Programme will take place from Tuesday, March 24th to Thursday, March 26th at the Triskel Cork and the EYE Cinema Galway. See programme details on: www.eaffi.ie
Below is a full list of the films showing at this year’s East Asia Film Festival Ireland.
10th East Asia Film Festival 2026 – Full Programme:
Agnis Shen Zhongmin
Thursday 19th (18.15)
Film info: 94 mins, China, 2026, Digital, Subtitled. Festival selection: Panorama Section, Berlin International Film Festival 2026
Agnis Shen Zhongmin’s lyrical debut follows Ming, a woman from Shanghai who journeys to Xishuangbanna’s rubber plantation where her late father was sent during the Cultural Revolution. The old production team house faces demolition to make way for a mining company and modern agricultural projects. Blending fiction, ethnography and travelogue, this moving hybrid film immerses us in family history and China’s vanishing traditions set against the phenomenal landscapes of southwestern China, where flora and fauna become characters of their own.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Agnis Shen Zhongmin.
THE KILLER (DIE XUE SHUANG XIONG)
John Woo
Thursday 19th (20.45)
Film info: 111 mins, Hong Kong,1989, Digital, Subtitled
We are thrilled to present the Irish premiere of the stunning 4K restoration of The Killer, one of the most accomplished films by iconic Hong Kong action legend, John Woo.
It stars Chow Yun-Fat as the unforgettable Jeff–a poetic, disillusioned hitman with a code of honor in the vein of Melville’s Le Samouraï–who takes one final job to pay for eye surgery for Jenny, a lounge singer he accidentally blinded during his last mission. Produced by Tsui Hark and made after the huge hit, A Better Tomorrow, the film afforded Woo even greater creative control. ‘When it comes to the action in a movie,’ Woo said, ‘it’s all about the beauty of the body movement and the fighting skill.’
The screening will be introduced by journalist and film critic John Maguire.
Lloyd Lee Choi
Friday 20th (18.15)
103 mins, USA-Canada, 2025, Digital, Subtitled. Festival selection: Director’s Fortnight, Cannes International Film Festival 2025
Korean-Canadian filmmaker Lloyd Lee Choi’s vivid directorial debut follows the tense 48 hours in the life of Lu, a food-delivery driver in New York. When his e-bike is stolen just hours before his wife Si Yu and young daughter Yaya (breakout Carabelle Manna Wei) arrive from Taipei after five years apart, Lu must race against time to recover his bike and keep the new apartment he has secured for his family.
A pulsating exploration of the precarity and daily struggle of New York’s fractured immigrant gig-worker community, shot in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side, it echoes neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, Sean Baker’s Take Out, and the recent Souleymane’s Story.
The screening will be introduced by journalist and film critic Tara Brady.
Tan Si-you
Friday 20th (20.40)
Film info: 99 mins, Singapore-The Netherlands-France-Spain-South Korea, 2026, Digital, Subtitled. Festival selection: Official Selection, Toronto International Film Festival 2025
Four misfit sixteen-year-old schoolgirls huddle together to form a secret gang, rebelling against the rigid discipline of their elitist all-girls school in Singapore. Their sisterhood grows into a pact fueled by queer desire and shared frustration with adults who suppress their individuality. Singaporean filmmaker Tan Si-you’s energetic, immersive coming-of-age debut is tender, wistful, and quietly defiant. Messy, joyful performances and naturalistic dialogue capture teenage rebellion while exploring girlhood, identity, fierce intimacy, and the raw, communal joy of resisting and belonging together.
(YE MEI GUI ZHI LIAN)
Wong Tin-lam
Saturday 21st (13.00)
Film info: 134 mins, Hong Kong,1960, 4K Digital, Subtitled, B&W
Notes by Hong Kong Film Archive
One of the finest films in the history of Hong Kong cinema, a musical noir where cigarette smoke becomes a character itself. Director Wong Tin-lam’s expressionistic sets and high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, combined with a sophisticated use of music, revives 1940s-50s songstress films with a modern edge. Jazz, blues and Western opera are woven into popular songs by Japanese composer Hattori R. Grace Chang stars as the tempestuous nightclub singer nicknamed ‘Wild Rose’ who seduces a pianist and then falls fatally in love. Her sensual rendition of a song adapted from Bizet’s Carmen still mesmerises.
The screening will be introduced by Prof. Chris Berry.
THE RIVER THAT HOLDS OUR HANDS
(ONG6 A7 ONG6)
Jianhang Chen
Saturday 21st (15.45)
Film info: 85 mins, Hong Kong-China-Vietnam-Korea, 2025, Digital, Subtitled. Festival slection: Official Selection, Busan International Film Festival 2025.
Jianhang Chen’s beautiful hybrid docufiction feature, set between Southeast Asia and southern China, is a poetic meditation on memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma within the Teochew diaspora. In Hong Kong, elderly Vietnamese woman Lam Po Wah, whose life has been shaped by displacement, dreams of returning to childhood scenes. In Ho Chi Minh City, documentarian Ah Wie, carrying Po Wah’s 70-year-old family photograph, searches for her long-lost home in Saigon. What connects ancestors, descendants, and the diaspora is the river of their homeland: ‘War may divide us, but only rivers and mountains recount the memories.’
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with producer Ziyang Lin.
(NÜHAI)
Shu Qi
Saturday 21st (18.10)
Film info: 124 mins. China-Taiwan, 2025, Digital, Subtitled. Festival award: Shu Qi, Winner Best Director, Busan International Film Festival 2025.
Taiwanese star Shu Qi, known for her work in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films (The Assassin; Millennium Mambo) makes her directorial debut with this stark, deeply personal coming-of-age drama. Set in 1980s Taipei, teenager Hsiao-lee navigates a poisoned home life, enduring her alcoholic father’s rages alongside her exhausted mother and younger sister. When she befriends classmate Li Lili, also from a troubled home, a new life opens up for her. Through captivating, potent performances, Yu Jing-Pin’s luminous cinematography, long static takes, delicate details and poetic impressions–ambient sounds, close-ups of fleeting visions like a red balloon escaping a school bag – Shu Qi creates an immersive and tenderly poignant portrait of pained adolescence.
(TABI TO HIBI)
Shô Miyake
Saturday 21st (20.45)
Film info: 89 mins, Japan, 2025, Digital, Subtitled. Festival award: Winner Golden Leopard Award, Locarno International Film Festival 2025.
Curation and notes by documentarian Kazuhiro Soda.
Japanese director Shô Miyake (Small, Slow But Steady, 2022; All the Long Nights, 2024) adapts two classic manga pieces by legendary cartoonist Yoshiharu Tsuge, turning the 50-year-old source material into a film that feels both contemporary and timeless. Yuta Tsukinaga’s neatly composed Academy-ratio cinematography speaks more eloquently than words. The slow, meditative tone reveals small events that happen by chance in our daily lives, and how we respond to them.
The screening will be introduced by Marie-Pierre Richard (EAFFI Festival curator)
Peter Yung
Sunday 22nd (13.00)
Film info: 88 mins, Hong Kong, 1979, 4K Digital, Subtitled
Notes by M+ Restored.
Peter Yung’s debut feature intricately portrays the relationships between drug dealers, police, and informants. Inspector Chan (Pai Ying) persuades drug lord Hung’s assistant, Tam (Sek Kin), to cooperate and gather evidence against Hung. However, the operation is sabotaged, complicating matters further. The film’s solid and detailed depiction of investigations and drug trafficking, combined with documentary techniques–handheld cinematography, on-location shooting capturing a lost Hong Kong of the 1970s–distinguishes it among Hong Kong’s first New Wave cinema. Filled with memorable scenes, particularly police undercover operations in street-level surveillance and Inspector Chan’s solitary mountain journeys to observe birds at dawn.
THE SYSTEM will be preceded by the short film SIGHTNOTSEEING (Director: Sheungman Yim. 11 mins, Hong Kong-UK, 2026.)
The screening will be introduced by Prof. Chris Berry.
(QUÁN KỲ NAM)
Leon Le
Sunday 22nd (15.00)
Film info: 140 mins, Vietnam, 2025, Digital, Subtitled. Festival award: Winner Kau Ka Hōkū (Shooting Star) Grand Jury Award, Hawaiʻi International Film Festival 2025
Notes by Trà My Nguyễn Hoàng.
Khang is on his way to success. Through family connections, he is assigned the much-coveted job of working on a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Moving to Saigon, he meets his neighbour Kỳ Nam, a reserved widow of a Southern Vietnamese officer who now cooks for a living. Beautifully captured on 35mm, this slow-paced, lyrical tale explores conflicting desires and chance encounters. A love letter to post-war Saigon’s vibrancy and eccentricities, this film is tenderly rendered and contained within a single apartment building.
The screening will be introduced by Trà My Nguyễn Hoàng.
WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU
(GEU JAYEONI NEGE MWORAGO HANI)
Hong Sangsoo
Sunday, 22nd (18.00)
Film info: 108 mins, South Korea, 2025, Digital, Subtitled. Festival selection: Main competition, Berlin International Film Festival 2025.
Donghwa, a wandering poet in his thirties, drives his girlfriend Junhee to her parents’ home on the outskirts of Seoul. Though they’ve been dating for three years, Junhee has never told her parents about him. When Donghwa steps out of his car to smoke and admire the house and its hilly garden, Junhee’s friendly father catches him and insists on taking Donghwa’s classic car for a spin. The brief visit turns into an unexpected family day and evening, gradually revealing everyone’s true nature. Drifting between charm, clumsiness, and quiet cruelty, this is another playful and vital meditation on human nature by Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo, a festival regular and much-loved director.
Festival ticket bundles are available for IFI members, offering 3 films for €30.00, and 5 films for €50.00 – available only from the IFI Box Office or over the phone on (01) 679 5744.
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