What's better than to celebrate the New Year with a line-up of festive swinging and dancing films that offers a wealth of entertaining wonders? Scratch below that glittering surface and one finds the question that forever plagues a filmmaker: the balance between artistic, creative integrity and commercial concerns.

The screening calendar from January through June 2017 will be marked with a fantastic range of works spanning three decades of filmmaking from the 1950s to the 80s. Hop on The Band Wagon (1953) for a first taste of Hollywood glamour and follow it with Calendar Girl (1959) and Les Belles (1961), two Mandarin gems in all their technicolour glory, alongside Purple Night (1968), Chor Yuen's tour de force that illuminates the collision of art and business. James Wong's Let's Rock (1975) and Alan Parker's Fame (1980) wrap up the showcase of films set against the disco scene that erupted in the 1970s and reached fever pitch with Grease: songwriter James Wong took the directorial reins in Hong Kong's answer to pop music and musicals, breaking the archetypal Western musical by infusing his notes and words with a local consciousness; Parker painted a realistic portrait of teenagers struggling to achieve their dreams of stardom.

Piecing together lives onstage and off, these films offer a poignant glimpse of the enigmatic world of showbiz and the road to success paved with pain and perseverance: an aging actor whose work dries up; an aspirant who, blinded by his overnight fame, abandons his dreams; a self-made actor who painstakingly works his way up the ladder of stardom.