That Quentin Tarantino chose to begin his “Kill Bill” films with the Shaw Brothers monogram speaks volumes about that fan’s tender affection for the Hong Kong studio’s 1970s kung-fu movie output. It doesn’t, however, address the fact that the Shaw Brothers logo – an unintentionally psychedelic “SB” shield at the head and the modest reminder that you’ve just seen “Another Shaw Production” at the tail – book ended not only martial-arts pictures but musicals, romances, and comedies by the score from the 1950s into the 1980s. Mr. Tarantino’s grind house shout out points up the cult film ghetto this remarkable studio has unfortunately come to inhabit in the minds of Western audiences.

As a sidebar to the New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater is hosting “Elegance, Passion, and Cold Hard Steel: A Tribute to the Shaw Brothers Studios.” The 12-picture retrospective, which started Saturday and continues through October 13, showcases the remarkable productions of the four Shaw brothers.

Like their Hollywood counterparts, the Shaws entered film production in order to have a reliable source of product for the theaters they had acquired at the dawn of motion pictures. As exhibitors and showmen, the Singapore-based Shaws were unequaled in the Far East. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, they augmented their city theaters with traveling cinema tent shows shepherded from as far a field as Borneo. After weathering bayonet-point divestiture and partnering with the occupying Japanese army during World War II, Shaw and Sons (as their theater, amusement park, real estate, and film distribution combination became known) at last resumed production in both Singapore and Hong Kong.

By the late 1950s, their Hong Kong studio’s output had been eclipsed by upstart competition. Yearning for “the pleasure, the excitement and the fulfillment which I’ve always craved,” youngest brother Run Run Shaw (later Sir) arrived in Hong Kong ready to take on the entire Asian market. He purchased an enormous parcel of Kowloon farmland for peanuts and broke ground on what would become Movietown, the largest privately owned film studio in the world. Shaw and Sons became Shaw Brothers, and Run Run Shaw became the Louis B. Mayer of Asia.

Like Mayer’s MGM in its prime, Shaw Brothers was a model of vertical integration. The studio developed, cast, shot, edited, and publicized their films in-house, then released them into their own theaters. Like Mayer, whose white picket fence, “there’s no place like home” Americana is synonymous with Hollywood studio filmmaking’s golden age, Run Run Shaw fathered a modern vision of Chinese history whose mythos has outlived his studio’s heyday.

A characteristic gem and the studio’s biggest initial success, the 1958 musical “The Kingdom and the Beauty” married traditional Chinese opera to modern film musical conventions perfected in both Hollywood and Bollywood. Its initially light romantic story of a restless young bachelor emperor posing as a commoner to dally with a naive small-town girl turns “The Prince and the Pauper” on its ear when the girl winds up pregnant and abandoned. Sentimental patriotism and true hearts yielded happy endings for the just plain folks in Mayer’s movie America, but time and again in Shaw films the shop girls, thieves, court eunuchs, and concubines that are the otherwise anonymous witnesses to China’s tumultuous history and epic myths get screwed. In the case of “Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan,” the Shaw’s 1972 entry into the then thriving international art-house erotica market, the screwing becomes literal.

In the late 1960s, strongly influenced by the precision violence of Japanese samurai films, Shaw-trained directors like Zhang Cheh and Chu Yuan brought ambitious action choreography and increasingly graphic bloodletting to the formerly staid Chinese swordfight film. In the 1970s, noting that “the public loves action, all kinds of action,” Run Run Shaw urged his directors to take screen combat even further. Zhang’s martial arts films replaced the conventionally effete male heroes of traditional Chinese opera with taciturn anti-heroes more like those in Western action movies. His 1973 “Blood Brothers” is a lexicon of kung-fu movie excesses: whip zooms, purloined western soundtrack cues, over-the-top sound effects, and the requisite abrupt ending. But “Blood Brothers” also contains a surprisingly affecting love triangle between a bandit, his wife, an ambitious Qing dynasty general, and the remarkably charismatic David Chaing as yet another anonymous have-not ground beneath the heel of history.

Run Run Shaw’s 1970s and 1980s flurry of international production deals, most notably shouldering a third of the price tag for Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” yielded more wisdom about the risks of global film co-production than actual wealth. By the mid-1980s increased competition at home, decreased interest abroad, and a number of bad guesses about public tastes in both markets had forced Shaw Brothers to streamline. Today they remain the chief independent film distributor in the Far East and a major player in real estate and television production in Southeast Asia. But, like the backlot at MGM, Movietown has gone quiet, and the catalog of exuberantly lyrical and reliably ingenious pictures was sold off.

Now, as if by the same fateful magic that united lovers and exonerated heroes in the Shaw Brothers classic productions, the masterpieces of this fading dynasty are on view here again in New York. For many filmgoers who aren’t members of the Film Society, this sidebar will be the event of the festival – for many shows, it’s still possible to get tickets.

– Bruce Bennett

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A prostitute’s body is her livelihood, and the streets her home. Keren Yedaya’s harrowing “Or (My Treasure),” is the story of a young girl driven beyond frustration in her attempts to prevent her over-the-hill prostitute mother from going out in the streets. Or (Dana Ivgy) is a hardworking teenager whose attempts to lead a normal life and protect her mother, Ruthie, are continually thwarted. Ruthie’s suffering, and the degradation and danger of her work, as she calls it, are nearly unbearable to watch.

This is a film about the bodies of the two women-clothed, naked, entangled with each other in embraces and fights. Ruthie is tall and narrow, even more so in her towering “work” shoes, and always, even at home, exposes too much of her skin. We first perceive Or as a small pack mule, hunched under her knapsack, her simultaneously girlish and womanly form concealed by the tomboyish clothing she wears to attend school and for her tedious rounds of work as a dishwasher. Her first experience of love gives her a fleeting happiness that quickly changes to a cold, aggressive sexuality in direct imitation of her mother’s.

Ronit Elkabetz, so memorable in “Late Marriage,” is heartbreaking and discomfiting in a flamboyant performance that expresses the muddled, damaged sensibility of a woman who loves her daughter but is too selfish and self-destructive to change. Ms. Ivgy makes a great impression as the feral daughter who has seen too much to fit into the world. In one disturbing sequence, she endures a grotesque sexual encounter and then goes to school, where she boasts and laughs about it to her friends, who are clearly shocked but try to seem impressed.

Inevitably, like the women in “Persona,” the identities of mother and daughter merge; there are moments in which it is made deliberately uncertain which we are looking at. This sacrifice of the daughter’s individuality is the greatest tragedy of the film. Yet the setting unintentionally overshadows the story; as we look at the street cafes of Tel Aviv, it is impossible not to feel a kind of suspense that has nothing to do with the film. It serves as a reminder that, as Bogart said, the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world – a lesson instructive in society but distracting in cinema.

“Or,” a Transfax Film-Bizibi co-production, won the 2004 Camera d’Or at Cannes. It does not have a U.S. distributor, but we should all hope that someone soon picks it up. At the festival, it will be preceded by a short, “Frozen River,” a border-run drama that is an entirely different take on ambiguous mother daughter relationships, distinctly Christian and Muslim. The dialogue, symbolism, and actors (including Henry Jaglom regular Melissa Leo) are nearly as stiff as the river.

– Remy Holzer