Contemporary Hong Kong Film Festival

A green snake – who has practiced for 500 years to become human – grows jealous when her sister, a white snake who has practiced the art twice as long, falls in love with a naive human scholar. When Green Snake begins meddling in her sister’s romance, disaster follows.

“Green Snake,” director Tsui Hark’s 1993 adaptation of a Chinese folk tale, is one of five “modern classics” that will be shown at Yale University as part of a festival celebrating Hong Kong’s vibrant film industry.

“Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema” will be held during the first two weeks of April in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St., sponsored by the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New York, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Yale-China Association and the Yale Film Study Center.

In addition to the film screenings, the festival will include a lecture and panel discussion on Sunday, April 14. The talk, “Current Trends in Hong Kong Cinema,” will be presented at 1 p.m. by Barbara Scharres, director of the Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which shows more Hong Kong films than any other venue in the United States. At 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, there will be a panel discussion on Hong Kong cinema. The entire festival is open to the public free of charge.

The films:

“A Chinese Ghost Story,” a 1987 work by director Ching Siu- Tung, is about an itinerant tax collector who seeks shelter from a storm in a deserted temple haunted by a beautiful spirit. One of the most popular Hong Kong films of the past 10 years, this work stars Joey Wong and Leslie Cheung known to Western audiences from his performance in “Farewell My Concubine. It will be shown at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2.

“God of Gamblers” is director Wong Jing’s 1989 thriller about the world of professional gambling. Action movie veteran Chow Yun-Fat and singer/actor Andy Lau star in the work, Hong Kong’s second highest-grossing film of the 1980s. It will be screened at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3.

“Green Snake,” starring Maggie Cheung see description above, will be shown at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 11.

“He’s a Woman, She’s a Man” is a comedy about a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a woman posing as a man. Leslie Cheung and Anita Yuen star in this 1994 film by director Chan Ho-sun. It will be shown at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 14.

“The Bodyguard from Beijing” features Jet Li as a mainland Chinese bodyguard who must protect a witness sequestered before a trial, with Christy Cheung as the witness, a fashionable and materialistic Hong Kong beauty. The 1994 work by director Yuen Kwai will be shown at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 14.