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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe word is out: Mubi has acquired the worldwide rights for Luca Guadagnino's luminous short film The Staggering Girl, starring Julianne Moore, Mia Goth, KiKi Layne, Kyle MacLachlan and more. Deadline has the full report.We're very saddened that due to Ontario's arts funding cuts, the essential feminist film magazine cléo has announced their immediate closure. At The Globe & Mail, the magazine's editors and contributors reflect upon their run and the tangible community it fostered.The wait for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's long gestating project with Tilda Swinton, entitled Memoria, is nearly over. The film has finally gone to camera, and Variety provides a glimpse of the set.Recommended Viewing With The Laundromat, it looks like Soderbergh returns to his (welcomed!) comedic register alongside a stellar cast—Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Sharon Stone...

Maybe It's Love. Photo courtesy of Celestial Pictures.The inspired "Shaw Sisters" retrospective at Metrograph focuses on women filmmakers who worked at the legendary Hong Kong studio. Two of the films—Maybe It's Love (1984) and My Name Ain't Suzie (1985)—were directed by Angie Chen. After directing a third feature, Chen turned to commercials and documentaries.Chen's life encompasses a broad swath of Chinese history. Born in Shanghai, she and her family caught the last train to Hong Kong during the civil war. They relocated for a time in Taiwan, moving back to Hong Kong when Chen's father left his family for Germany. Chen won a scholarship to a college outside Chicago, then transferred first to the University of Iowa before enrolling at UCLA. While translating a screenplay, she met Jackie Chan, who made her his assistant director on Dragon Lord (1982), a martial arts film shot in South Korea. Back in Hong Kong,...

Hong Kong filmmaker Chan Tze-woon recently returned from a fruitful trip to the Busan Intl. Film Festival. The 31-year-old’s new project, “Blue Island,” was selected to take part in the Asian Cinema Fund during the festival, where he met producers from South Korea and the U.S. and film fest directors who might be interested in the project, a documentary.

“Blue Island” is a trip down memory lane of Hong Kong through the stories of three men and an account of how their experiences of historical events, including the 1967 riots, the Cultural Revolution in mainland China and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, have shaped their destinies. Chan’s project was awarded $5,000 under the fund’s Asian Network of Documentary Fund.

It was another milestone for the young filmmaker, whose “Yellowing” (2016), a documentary about Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, won the New Asian Currents Ogawa Shinsuke Prize at the 15th Yamagata Intl.

Following her award-winning documentary, “One Tree Three Lives” on the novelist Hualing Nieh Engle, Hong Kong director Angie Chen embarks on a rather difficult mission, of shooting a documentary about Yank Wong, a man who makes clear from the beginning, that he does not want to participate in this film. His attitude results in a number of arguments with the director, that, actually, form one of the bases of this very interesting documentary.

Chen, who is friend of Yank Wong, portrays his everyday life quite closely, despite his continuous protests, and in the process, presents, quite thoroughly, a true artist who is a painter, art director, set designer, writer, musician, and photographer, and for whom, creation in all artistic forms is the only way of living. Apart from the artist, though, whose presentation also includes his life story, Chen also portrays the man, particularly through the interaction with his friends...