Which Shanghai Film Festival Tickets Should You Fight For? Here Are 10 Films Worth the Trouble

Good luck.

Time to get ready for the scramble.

On May 27, the organizing committee of the 20th Shanghai International Film Festival announced that tickets for this year's screening program go on sale at 8 a.m. on June 11, 2017. Moviegoers can grab them online through the Taopiaopiao app, or buy them in person at outlets such as the Shanghai Film Art Center and the Grand Cinema.

The festival itself opens on June 17. Every June, these nine days turn into a film-culture event that wraps competition, trading and forums into one.

But for most ordinary moviegoers, the festival means something simpler: a huge batch of art-house and classic films, all released at once, for a very short time. In 2016 the program was split into 36 sections holding close to 600 films. Tickets for the 19th festival went on sale on June 4, and committee figures showed box office reaching 16.406 million yuan by midnight that same day.

So what is playing, when tickets open, and whether you can actually get one — those are the questions moviegoers care about before the festival starts.

Since April, the Shanghai festival has been releasing its lineup piece by piece. By one media count, 114 films have been announced so far; a tally from the festival's official site turns up 97 films across 14 confirmed sections. Those include the long-running documentary section, the FOX 2000 Selected Films showcase, the Chairman's Showcase, the 4K Restoration section and SIFF Classics, plus special sections such as Disney's Ten Animated Classics and the Belt and Road section.

One thing worth noting: for the first time, the festival has built a section for younger audiences, "Midnight Wonders," devoted to independent films with a distinctive streak. On May 26 the organizers announced its first five titles: Pulp Fiction, The Exorcist, Pink Floyd – The Wall, Ring and Deadpool.

On June 1 the festival added another new section, "Bridge" — meant as "a bridge of cultural exchange linking China's film market and the international independent film market." Its films come mainly from the big American independent festivals; five are listed so far, among them Ryan 1974 and Life of Cards (《纸牌人生》).

Once the excitement over the lineup wears off, there is still the misery of buying tickets.

From 2011 to 2014, online sales for the Shanghai festival ran through Gewara, a local ticketing platform. Every one of those years brought complaints about the system.

On sale day in 2014, Gewara counted 50,000 users online from the small hours onward. One second before sales opened, nearly 10,000 people launched the app at the same time; an hour later, 100,000 were online. At times the online and offline systems locked the same screening simultaneously, and messages like "system crashed" and "error" kept appearing.

In April 2015, Taopiaopiao took the festival's ticketing rights away from Gewara, which had held them for years. By 2016 Taopiaopiao was the festival's exclusive online seller. Which produced the Taopiaopiao outage of June 2016 — one hour and twenty minutes of downtime, followed by a limp official response, both of which became a hot topic on social media just before the 19th festival.

So this year people are watching Taopiaopiao closely. On the morning of May 27 it announced the sale time alongside the organizing committee and launched a "Shanghai Film Festival" page, which has since kept up with screening schedules and ticket-buying guides.

Taopiaopiao also says it has a fix for the queues at physical pickup counters: from June 11 to 16, anyone who has already bought a ticket can collect it at any participating theater from a dedicated scan-code machine.

What it still has not said is how it plans to avoid last year's humiliation. All it wrote, at the end of the notice, was: "The rest comes down to how fast your fingers are — and how badly you love movies."

Finally, out of the 114 films announced so far, we picked 10 to help you plan, using the viewing priority of "restored classics – award winners – special screenings – main competition" together with overall ratings.

Seven Samurai (4K Restoration)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune / Takashi Shimura / Yoshio Inaba / Seiji Miyaguchi / Minoru Chiaki

Kurosawa's signature work, once voted No. 1 on Kinema Junpo's list of the ten best Japanese films ever made.

George Lucas has said more than once that the story of Star Wars began here.

The seven samurai have sharply different temperaments, and between them they cover the seven sides of the samurai spirit; added together, they are bushido itself. At the end, Kurosawa overturns the creed those men live by, and what shows through is human nature as it really is, and the cruelty of an age of chaos. Seven Samurai also reaches past the limits of the epic: it is packed with jokes and irony, which makes it an excellent comedy as well.

Manhattan (4K Restoration)

Director: Woody Allen

Screenwriters: Marshall Brickman / Woody Allen

Cast: Diane Keaton / Meryl Streep / Woody Allen / Michael Murphy / Mariel Hemingway

"A comedy writer divorces his wife, who has left him for another woman. Heartbroken, he falls for a seventeen-year-old girl, and then strikes sparks with his best friend's mistress — the friend being a married man himself."

The whole film is vintage Woody Allen, about how middle-class intellectuals live and love, and the talk never stops: exhausting and impossible to turn away from. Allen plays the comedy writer, and gives his own motor-mouth nature a full airing.

The film won Best Film at the 1980 British Academy Film Awards and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 52nd Academy Awards.

Legend of the Mountain (4K Restoration)

Director: King Hu

Cast: Shih Chun / Hsu Feng / Sylvia Chang / Tien Feng / Wu Mingcai

King Hu working in the manner of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, adapted from "A Nest of Ghosts in the Western Hills" in the Song-dynasty story collection 《宋人话本》. It folds together Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, ghosts and spirits, and martial-arts adventure. A scholar goes into the mountains at a senior monk's request to copy sutras, and everyone he meets there turns out to be a ghost — a strange encounter in the hills, a dream inside a dream. Douban users have described it as "Dead Man + The Castle + Pedro Páramo + Tang-dynasty tales of the strange + Notes from Yuewei Cottage."

It won five prizes at the 16th Golden Horse Awards, including Best Director.

Battleship Potemkin (SIFF Classics)

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Screenwriter: Sergei Eisenstein

Cast: Aleksandr Antonov / Vladimir Barsky / Grigori Aleksandrov

Where the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence comes from. In this film Eisenstein defined, perfectly, what montage is for.

Drawn from real events, it tells the story of the mutiny aboard the Potemkin at Odessa against the corrupt rule and bloody crackdowns of the Tsarist government. The Odessa Steps sequence runs a mere six minutes and is cut from more than a hundred shots, rebuilding and enlarging time and space to sharpen the film's force. Beyond the montage, its aggressive camera movement and composition make it a textbook for anyone studying film.

Destiny (SIFF Classics)

Director: Fritz Lang

Screenwriters: Fritz Lang / Thea von Harbou

Cast: Lil Dagover / Walter Janssen / Bernhard Goetzke / Hans Sternberg / Carl Rückert / Max Adalbert / Wilhelm Diegelmann / Erich Pabst / Georg John

A silent film directed in 1921 by the German Expressionist master Fritz Lang. Through a narrative built in separate blocks, and figures and settings beyond imagining, it tells a fantastical story about human nature.

To save her fiancé from death, a woman makes a pact with Death and tries three times to rescue the man she loves; three times she fails. Death then gives her one more chance — but this time what he is testing is her conscience.

Institutions across Europe and America worked together to give this 1921 film, at last, a flawless restoration.

Ring ("Midnight Wonders")

Director: Hideo Nakata

Screenwriters: Hiroshi Takahashi / Koji Suzuki

Cast: Nanako Matsushima / Hiroyuki Sanada / Yuko Takeuchi / Miki Nakatani / Hitomi Sato

The film that fits "Midnight Wonders" best.

In this Japanese horror film, Nakata, his producer and the source novel use the everyday hardware of modern life — videotapes, cameras, televisions, sonar detectors — to sell two ideas: that a ghost is something modern science can pick out as real, and that the terrifying thing may be right next to you. That realism is what later drove the strong box office of the One Missed Call series.

After its 1998 release came sequels including Ring 2: Sadako's Curse and Ring: The Truth About Sadako, and from 2012 a run of 3D versions.

Watch it again after all these years and it turns out to be just as frightening.

Beyond the Hills (Chairman's Showcase)

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Cast: Cosmina Stratan / Cristina Flutur

A 150-minute drama co-produced by Romania, France and Belgium, adapted from two works of nonfiction by the journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran, about an elderly nun who died after an exorcism in 2005.

The film runs about 150 minutes — and audiences will feel it runs far longer. Mungiu leans on long takes throughout and uses almost no score, building his background out of natural sound so that it works with the story rather than over it. Cool, distant and oppressive, the film was selected for the main competition at the 65th Cannes Film Festival and won Best Screenplay and Best Actress.

World on a Wire ("Tribute to the Masters")

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Screenwriters: Daniel F. Galouye / Fritz Müller-Scherz / Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast: Klaus Löwitsch / Mascha Rabben / Barbara Valentin

World on a Wire is a two-part science-fiction film Fassbinder made for television in 1973, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron-3. Hollywood later remade it as The Thirteenth Floor, and it deeply inspired the later series on the same subject, The Matrix.

It runs three and a half hours, and plays less like science fiction than like a mystery.

Rights problems have kept it off the screen almost entirely since that first television broadcast, and theatrical showings have been rarer still: in the past 15 years it has played in cinemas only twice.

Long Strange Trip (Documentary)

Country: United States

Director: Amir Bar-Lev

Runtime: 256 minutes

A documentary about the rock band Grateful Dead. Founded in 1969, this epic American psychedelic band is the founding father of the genre. Over four hours long, the film gathers a great deal of concert footage along with material from the band's daily life and work; fans, critics, producers, band members and their families look back across the whole of its history.

It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2017, and had a one-week limited release in New York and Los Angeles from May 26, 2017. From June 2 it goes up on Amazon Video in 220 countries.

The Story Behind Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom ("Spotlight on Italy")

Director: David Grieco

Screenwriters: Guido Bulla / David Grieco

Cast: Massimo Ranieri / Libero De Rienzo / Matteo Taranto

Also translated as "The Murder of Pasolini."

After the legendary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini finished the erotic film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, he was found beaten to death on a beach. This film is drawn from that death: during the summer of 1975, while he was making Salò, Pasolini collided with a turbulent Italian society, and that chain of crimes ended in his killing.

A legendary man, a legendary film, and the legendary story behind them both.

Cover image: a still from Hugo. In-body images: film posters.