Overheard is a crime drama starring Lau Ching-Wan, Louis Koo and Daniel Wu. (Reel Asian International Film Festival)

Toronto's Reel Asian International Film Festival opens Wednesday with Overheard, the new film from the team that created the Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs.

Alan Mak and Felix Chong have created a new crime drama with Overheard, about a trio of cops investigating market manipulation in Hong Kong. As they do surveillance on a man believed to be working the markets, they cannot resist the temptation to make a little extra on the side.

"Our society is becoming such an ambiguous state … we're all morally grey, and this film is to illustrate such weakness in our humanity," said Chong.

The film pulls together three of Hong Kong's best-known actors, Lau Ching-Wan, Daniel Wu and Louis Koo, who reportedly gained 30 pounds for the role.

Yang Ik-June directs and stars as the gangster who radiates suppressed violence in Breathless. (Reel Asian International Film Festival)

Mak and Chong, who first began working together in 2002, created three films in the Infernal Affairs franchise with the first adapted by Martin Scorsese as The Departed.

Reel Asian will present 49 east and southeast Asian films over the next five days, including 12 world premieres.

A centrepiece of the festival will be the resurrection of the 1929 Chinese movie Red Heroine, a silent wuxia martial arts film that features a flying female warrior.

It will be screened Nov. 13, accompanied by live music by the Devil Music Ensemble.

The U.S.-based ensemble created an original score for the film, incorporating Chinese music and their own unique style.

Red Heroine was originally a 13-part series, but most of the reels were lost during the Cultural Revolution, when the film was banned in China.

"We chose Red Heroine because it was something almost no one had seen or heard of," said Jonah Rapino, violinist with Devil Music.

"Red Heroine was hidden, especially in a genre when there are so many martial arts that people have seen — Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films, for example. This was our chance to show something rarely seen, like sharing a secret," he said.

Also on the festival schedule:

• When the Full Moon Rises, a musical film noir by Mamat Khalid of Malaysia.
• Yanggaw by Richard Somes, a vampire thriller from The Philippines.
• Yang Yangby by Chen Yu-Chieh of Taiwan.
• Fish Story, a black comedy by Yoshihiro Nakamura of Japan.
• White on Rice by David Boyle, a Japanese-American comedy.

The festival closes Nov. 15 with Breathless, the debut film by South Korea's Yang Ik-June, which has been critically acclaimed at festivals around the world.

It follows a petty criminal with a tragic history as he forms a relationship with a damaged schoolgirl that descends into domestic violence.