In the Mood for Love is a 2000 romance film produced in Hong Kong, where it is known as Fa yeung nin wa.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118694/releaseinfo#akas It was written, directed, and produced by Wong Kar-wai, with cinematography by Christopher Doyle, Pung-Leung Kwan, and Mark Lee Ping-bin. Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung star. The film premiered on May 20, 2000 at the Cannes Film Festival, and debuted in U.S. theaters on February 2, 2001.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118694/releaseinfo In 2010, the U.K.'s Guardian named In the Mood for Love the fifth greatest romance film of all time.http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/oct/16/mood-for-love-romance

The film was conceived as a more conventional, low-budget romance called Summers in Beijing, and production began in 1997.http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/197-in-the-mood-for-lovehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM1Qu4AqorE&feature=watch_response_rev Due to an economic crisis in Asia, along with Wong's method of improvisation with his actors, the film ran over budget and fell behind schedule.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxtghVmzL7E&feature=related Wong's original story idea was set in both the 1960s and 1990s, but was refined to take place exclusively in the 1960s, a time when Hong Kong became overcrowded with Shanghai immigrants escaping the political turmoil of Mainland China.http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/197-in-the-mood-for-love Wong grew up during this era and was inspired by the culture and gossip within these isolated immigrant communities. He constructed the film to be about how a community keeps the secret of an affair over a period of years.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxtghVmzL7E&feature=related

Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Chow (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) are neighbors in a crowded Hong Kong tenement in 1962 who form a friendship. Both suspect their respective spouses are having an affair. Not only are their suspicions soon confirmed, they discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Over a period of years, Li-zhen's and Chow's friendship threatens to blossom into its own love affair, but the duo are too ashamed by social conventions to act on their emotions.

In the Mood for Love received 54 award nominations from various film festivals, critics associations, and countries, predominantly for the cinematography team and director Wong Kar-wai. It won a total of ten Best Film or Best Foreign Film honors. The 2000 Cannes Film Festival awarded Best Actor to Tony Leung Chiu Wai.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118694/awards

Due to the film's long-delayed production, completion of In the Mood for Love overlapped with the beginning of Wong Kar-wai's follow-up film, 2046, which also features Tony Leung Chiu Wai as Chow.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxtghVmzL7E&feature=related The title of the sequel has multiple meanings, referring to the hotel room where Chow stays in In the Mood for Love, to a fictional setting in one of Chow's stories, and also to the calendar year, which has political significance in Hong Kong.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118694/triviahttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212712/trivia