Subway Cinema/NYAFF Presents: OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST 2014!

The movie that cracked the genre in half, 36th Chamber is king of the kung fu films — everyone references it, everyone steals from it, but it still holds up today. LKL’s god-brother, Gordon Liu, plays a kid in Manchu-occupied China who gets his entire family killed by the Manchus because he is an idiot. With nowhere else to go, he flees to the Shaolin Temple, and begs them to train him for revenge. Training involves mastering 35 chambers, each teaching a different discipline, and as he conquers them one-by-one the Buddhist philosophy behind Shaolin kung fu opens his third eye to enlightenment. The training sequence is a stock martial arts movie setpiece, but in the hands of LKL it expands into an hour-long, genius-level, cinematic tone poem on how discipline, focus, commitment, and willpower can save you from yourself.

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