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Irma Vep 1996

In 1994, having made nearly 70 films in less than a decade, Maggie Cheung took a two-year hiatus from acting. Irma Vep marked her return to the screen and quickly became one of her most iconic roles. Directed by Olivier Assayas, Irma Vep (an anagram of ‘vampire’) is a hallucinatory film-within-a-film satire, which explores the state of cinema at the centenary of the medium, and the fine line between art and life.

Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself, brought to Paris to play the role of Irma, the legendary French cat burglar character in Louis Feuillade’s silent serial Les Vampires 1915–16. At the helm of the project is the washed-up auteur René Vidal (the legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud), who has hired Maggie on the basis of his (confused) attraction to her in The Heroic Trio 1993. Meanwhile, other members of the film crew, not least the costume designer Zoé (Nathalie Richard) who is tasked with creating a black latex bodysuit for Maggie, project their own desires onto her. As the shoot falls into absurd disarray, Maggie experiences a sense of dislocation, trying to understand French cinema, and her own persona as a star of Asian cinema, from the outside.

99 minutes | M | Low level coarse language, Nudity

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung 1997

Commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, this affectionately intimate experimental portrait of Maggie Cheung was shot and edited by her then-husband Olivier Assayas. Cheung’s unguarded domestic life, including her facial routine, is ‘cut-up’ and abstracted in a rhythmic silent short film.

5 minutes | All Ages