In a sweeping move to champion Asian cinema, Chanel‘s Culture Fund is making waves across Hong Kong and Thailand, uniting Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton and Palme d’Or recipient Apichatpong Weerasethakul for a landmark collaboration.
In Hong Kong, Chanel’s partnership with M+ museum is spearheading a restoration program under the guidance of Silke Schmickl, Chanel lead curator of moving image, who will oversee the M+ Moving Image Centre’s collections, commissions and curatorial programs. The project will restore nine Hong Kong New Wave films, with three premiering at major international festivals in 2025: T’ang Shushuen’s “The Arch” (1968), Peter Yung’s “The System” (1979) and Patrick Tam’s “Love Massacre” (1981).
“It always occurs to me that there’s no such thing as an old film, because what cinema is, is the present, so you can look at a film that was created in 1923, and you are right there, and you can imagine a film that is going to be made in a hundred of years, and you will be right there then,” Swinton said about film preservation. “And there’s also no such thing as a new film because all films before you get to see it are just a little generation back. So it’s a real distillation of the present. So the idea of film preservation is built into the form.”
Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker T’ang Shushuen underscored cinema’s universal appeal: “Cinema is like a window looking into the human condition, so it’s a very powerful medium.”
The luxury house’s initiative, led by global head of arts and culture Yana Peel, will also showcase Weerasethakul’s debut of “A Conversation with the Sun (VR),” featuring a score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and visuals by Katsuya Taniguchi, at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival.
The Thai master filmmaker reflected on his cultural roots: “My kind of Asian cinema and our living have always been about ghosts – traces of history, of light, of things left unsaid. ‘A Conversation with the Sun’ (VR) is part of that lineage, but in a different form. It’s a cinema without a screen, where the sun itself becomes the object of contemplation. Bringing this piece to the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival is important because this city, this region, understands impermanence. Light moves, bodies disappear, memories dissolve. We are always drifting.”
The initiative includes M+ Rediscoveries, a recurring series showcasing restored classics and emerging Asian artists’ experimental cinema, alongside Avant-Garde Now, which features prominent video artists and experimental filmmakers across Asia. The French fashion powerhouse is also backing the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival and establishing a comprehensive film circulation library.
The collaboration also features “An Encounter: The Last Thing You Saw That Felt Like a Movie,” a lecture performance featuring Swinton and Weerasethakul in conversation, moderated by Kong Rithdee, blending sound, light, and film into an exploration of memory and perception.
Peel said: “It is a tremendous joy and honor to spotlight the region’s central importance in cinema and moving image, across its analogue history and its digital future.”