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EAST ASIAN CINEMA

* Cinema of China
* Cinema of Hong Kong
* Cinema of Japan
* Cinema of Korea
* Cinema of Taiwan

The cinema of Hong Kong is one of the three major threads in the
history of Chinese language cinema, alongside the cinema of China, and
the cinema of Taiwan. As a former British colony, Hong Kong had a
greater degree of political and economic freedom than Mainland China
and Taiwan, and developed into a filmmaking hub for the
Chinese-speaking world (including its worldwide diaspora) and for East
Asia in general. For decades, Hong Kong was the third largest motion
picture industry in the world (after Bollywood and Hollywood) and the
second largest exporter. Despite an industry crisis starting in the
mid-'90s and Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997,
Hong Kong film has retained much of its distinctive identity and
continues to play a prominent part on the world cinema stage.

In the West, Hong Kong's vigorous pop cinema has long had a strong
cult following, which has become large enough that it is now arguably
a part of the cultural mainstream, widely available and imitated. This
influence has been particularly heavy on recent Hollywood trends in
the action genre.
Contents

* 1 The Hong Kong industry
o 1.1 The star system
o 1.2 Budgets
o 1.3 Language and sound
* 2 History
o 2.1 1909 to World War II
+ 2.1.1 Pioneers from the stage
+ 2.1.2 The advent of sound
+ 2.1.3 The advent of war
o 2.2 The 1940s-1960s
+ 2.2.1 Competing languages
+ 2.2.2 Cantonese movies
+ 2.2.3 Mandarin movies and the Shaws/Cathay rivalry
o 2.3 Years of transformation (1970s)
+ 2.3.1 The Cantonese comeback
+ 2.3.2 Golden Harvest and the rise of the independents
+ 2.3.3 Other transformative trends
o 2.4 1980s-early 1990s: the boom years
+ 2.4.1 The international market
+ 2.4.2 Leaders of the boom
+ 2.4.3 Category III films
+ 2.4.4 Alternative cinema
o 2.5 Mid-1990s-Present: Post-boom
+ 2.5.1 The industry in crisis
+ 2.5.2 Recent trends
* 3 Notable persons
o 3.1 Directors
o 3.2 Cinematographers
o 3.3 Actors
o 3.4 Actresses
* 4 See also
* 5 Film awards
* 6 References
* 7 External links

The Hong Kong industry

Unlike many film industries, Hong Kong's has enjoyed little to no
direct government support, through either subsidies or import quotas.
It is a thoroughly commercial cinema: highly corporate, concentrating
on crowd-pleasing genres like comedy and action, and relying heavily
on formulas, sequels and remakes.

Hong Kong film derives a number of elements from Hollywood, such as
certain genre parameters, an ingratiating "thrill-a-minute" philosophy
and fast pacing and editing. But the borrowings are filtered through
elements from traditional Chinese drama and art, particularly a
penchant for stylization and a disregard for Western standards of
realism. This, combined with a fast and loose approach to the
filmmaking process, contributes to the energy and surreal imagination
that foreign audiences note in Hong Kong cinema.

The star system

As is common in commercial cinemas, the industy's heart is a highly
developed star system. In earlier days, beloved performers from the
Chinese opera stage often brought their audiences with them to the
screen. For the past three or four decades, television has been a
major launching pad for movie stardom, through the acting courses and
widely watched drama, comedy and variety series offered by the two
major stations; Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Stephen Chow are two top names
who began on the small screen. Possibly even more important is the
overlap with the Cantonese pop music industry. Many, if not most,
movie stars have recording sidelines, and vice versa; this has been a
key marketing strategy in an entertainment industry where
American-style, multimedia advertising campaigns have until recently
been little used (Bordwell, 2000). In the current commercially
troubled climate, the casting of young Cantopop idols (such as Ekin
Cheng and the Twins) to attract the all-important youth audience is
endemic.

In the small and tightly knit industry, actors (as well as other
personnel like directors) are kept very busy. During previous boom
periods, the number of movies made by a successful figure in a single
year could routinely reach into the double digits.

Budgets

Films are typically low-budget in comparison with American product. A
major release with a big star, aimed at "hit" status, will typically
cost around US$5 million (Yang et al., 1997). A low-budget feature can
go well below US$1 million. Occasional blockbuster projects by the
very biggest stars (Jackie Chan or Stephen Chow, for example) or
international co-productions aimed at the global market, can go as
high as US$20 million or more, but these are rare exceptions. Hong
Kong productions can nevertheless achieve a level of gloss and
lavishness greater than these numbers might suggest, given factors
like lower wages, the efficient professionalism typical of
behind-the-scenes personnel, and the general lack of the expensive
frills that are typical on Hollywood sets.

Language and sound

Since the 1980s, films have been made mostly in the Cantonese language.

For decades, films were typically shot silent, with dialogue and all
other sound dubbed afterwards. In the hectic and low-budget industry,
this method was faster and more cost-efficient than recording live
sound, particularly when using performers from different dialect
regions; it also helped facilitate dubbing into other languages for
the vital export market. Many busy stars would not even record their
own dialogue, but would be dubbed by a lesser-known performer.
Shooting without sound also contributed to an improvisatory filmmaking
approach. Movies often went into production without finished scripts,
with scenes and dialogue concocted on the set; especially low-budget
productions on tight schedules might even have actors mouth silently
or simply count numbers, with actual dialogue created only in the
editing process.

A trend towards sync sound filming grew in the late '90s and this
method is now the norm, partly because of a widespread public
association with higher quality cinema.

History

1909 to World War II

During its early history, Hong Kong's cinema played second fiddle to
that of the Mainland, particularly the city of Shanghai, which was
then the movie capital of the Chinese-speaking world. Very little of
this work is extant: one count finds only four films remaining out of
over 500 produced in Hong Kong before World War II (Fonoroff, 1997).
Detailed accounts of this period, especially those by non-Chinese
speakers, therefore have inherent limitations and uncertainties.

Pioneers from the stage

As in most of China, the development of early films was tightly bound
to Chinese opera, for centuries the dominant form of dramatic
entertainment. Opera scenes were the source for what are generally
credited as the first movies made in Hong Kong, two 1909 short
comedies entitled Stealing a Roasted Duck and Right a Wrong with
Earthenware Dish. The director was stage actor and director Liang
Shaobo. The producer was an American, Benjamin Brodsky (sometimes
transliterated 'Polaski'), one of a number of Westerners who helped
jumpstart Chinese film through their efforts to crack China's vast
potential market.

Credit for the first Hong Kong feature film is usually given to
Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (1913), which also took its story from the
opera stage, was helmed by a stage director and featured Brodsky's
involvement. Director Lai Man-Wai (Li Ming Wei or Li Minwei in
Mandarin) was a theatrical colleague of Liang Shaobo's who would
become known as the "Father of Hong Kong Cinema". In another borrowing
from opera, Lai played the role of wife himself. His brother played
the role of husband, and his wife a supporting role as a maid, making
her the first Chinese woman to act in a Chinese film, a milestone
delayed by longstanding taboos regarding female performers (Leyda,
1972). Zhuangzhi was the only film made by Chinese American Film,
founded by Lai and Brodsky as the first movie studio in Hong Kong, and
was never actually shown in the territory (Stokes and Hoover, 1999).

The following year, the outbreak of World War I put a large crimp in
the development of cinema in Hong Kong, as Germany was the source of
the colony's film stock (Yang, 2003). It was not until 1923 that Lai,
his brother and their cousin joined with Liang Shaobo to form Hong
Kong's first entirely Chinese-owned-and-operated production company,
the Minxin (or China Sun) Company. In 1924, they moved their operation
to the Mainland after government red tape blocked their plans to build
a studio. (Teo, 1997)

The advent of sound

With the popularity of talkies in the early 1930s, China's many,
mutually unintelligible, spoken dialects had to be grappled with. Hong
Kong was a major center for Cantonese, one of the most widely spoken,
and political factors on the Mainland provided other opportunities.
The government of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party wanted to
enforce a "Mandarin-only" policy and was hostile to Cantonese
filmmaking in China. It also banned the wildly popular wuxia genre of
martial arts swordplay and fantasy, accusing it of promoting
superstition and violent anarchy. Cantonese film and wuxia film
remained popular despite government hostility, and the British colony
of Hong Kong became a place where both of these trends could be freely
served. Filmed Cantonese operas proved even more successful than wuxia
and constituted the leading genre of the 1930s.

Major studios that thrived in this period were Grandview, Universal,
Nanyue and Tianyi (the last an early incarnation of the Shaw family
dynasty that would become the most enduring and influential in Chinese
film). (Teo, 1997)

The advent of war

Another important factor in the '30s was the Sino-Japanese War.
"National defense" films - patriotic war stories about Chinese
resisting the Japanese invasion - became one of Hong Kong's major
genres; notable titles included Kwan Man Ching's Lifeline (1935), Chiu
Shu Sun's Hand to Hand Combat (1937) and Situ Huimin's March of the
Partisans (1938). The genre and the film industry were further boosted
by emigre film artists and companies when Shanghai was taken by the
Japanese in 1937.

This of course came to an end when Hong Kong itself fell to the
Japanese in December 1941. But unlike on the Mainland, the occupiers
were not able to put together a collaborationist film industry. They
managed to complete just one propaganda movie, The Attack on Hong Kong
(1942; aka The Day of England's Collapse) before the British returned
in 1945 (Teo, 1997). A more important move by the Japanese may have
been to melt down many of Hong Kong's pre-war films to extract their
silver nitrate for military use (Fonoroff, 1997).

The 1940s-1960s

Postwar Hong Kong cinema, like postwar Hong Kong industries in
general, was catalyzed by the continuing influx of capital and talents
from Mainland China. This became a flood with the 1946 resumption of
the Chinese Civil War (which had been on hold during the fight against
Japan) and then the 1949 Communist victory. These events definitively
shifted the center of Chinese-language cinema to Hong Kong. The colony
also did big business exporting films to Southeast Asian countries
(especially but not exclusively their large Chinese expatriate
communities) and to Chinatowns in Western countries (Bordwell, 2000).

Competing languages

The postwar era also cemented the bifurcation of the industry into two
parallel cinemas, one in Mandarin, the dominant dialect of the
Mainland emigres, and one in Cantonese, the dialect of most Hong Kong
natives. Mandarin movies had much higher budgets and more lavish
production. Reasons included their enormous export market; the
expertise, capital and prestige of the Shanghai filmmakers; and the
cultural prestige of Mandarin, the official language of China and the
tongue of the Chinese cultural and political elite. For decades to
come, Cantonese films, though sometimes more numerous, were relegated
to second-tier status (Leyda, 1972).

Another language-related milestone occurred in 1963: the British
authorities passed a law requiring the subtitling of all films in
English, supposedly to enable a watch on political content. Making a
virtue of necessity, studios included Chinese subtitles as well,
enabling easier access to their movies for speakers of other dialects.
(Yang, 2003) Subtitling later had the unintended consequence of
facilitating the movies' popularity in the West.

Cantonese movies

During this period, Cantonese opera on film dominated. The top stars
were the female duo of Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet Sin (Yam-Pak for
short). Yam specialized in male scholar roles to Pak's female leads.
They made over fifty films together, The Purple Hairpin (1959) being
one of the most enduringly popular (Teo, 1997).

Low-budget martial arts films were also popular. A series of roughly
100 kung fu movies starring Kwan Tak Hing as historical folk hero Wong
Fei Hung were made, starting with The True Story of Wong Fei Hung
(1949) and ending with Wong Fei Hung Bravely Crushing the Fire
Formation (1970) (Logan, 1995). Fantasy wuxia (swordplay) serials with
special effects drawn on the film by hand, such as The Six-Fingered
Lord of the Lute (1965) starring teen idol Connie Chan Po-chu in the
lead male role, were also popular (Chute and Lim, 2003, 3), as were
contemporary melodramas of home and family life.

Mandarin movies and the Shaws/Cathay rivalry

In Mandarin production, Shaw Brothers and Motion Picture and General
Investments Limited (MP&GI, later renamed Cathay) were the top studios
by the 1960s, and bitter rivals. The Shaws gained the upper hand in
1964 after the death in a plane crash of MP&GI founder and head Loke
Wan Tho. The renamed Cathay faltered, ceasing film production in 1970
(Yang, 2003).

A musical genre called Hungmidio (梅調) was derived from Chinese
opera; the Shaws' record-breaking hit The Love Eterne (1963) remains
the classic of the genre. Historical costume epics often overlapped
with the Hungmidio, such as in The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959).
(Both of the above examples were directed by Shaw's star director, Li
Han Hsiang). Romantic melodramas such as Red Bloom in the Snow (1956),
Love Without End (1961), The Blue and the Black (1964) and adaptations
of novels by Chiung Yao were popular. So were Hollywood-style
musicals, which were a particular specialty of MP&GI/Cathay in entries
such as Mambo Girl (1957) and The Wild, Wild Rose (1960).

In the second half of the '60s, the Shaws inaugurated a new generation
of more intense, less fantastical wuxia films with glossier production
values, acrobatic moves and stronger violence. The trend was inspired
by the popularity of imported samurai movies from Japan (Chute and
Lim, 2003, 8), as well as by the loss of movie audiences to
television. This marked the crucial turn of the industry from a
female-centric genre system to an action movie orientation (see also
the Hong Kong action cinema article). Key trendsetters included Xu
Zenghong's Temple of the Red Lotus (1965), King Hu's Come Drink with
Me (1966) and Dragon Inn (1967, made in Taiwan; aka Dragon Gate Inn),
and Chang Cheh's Tiger Boy (1966), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) and
Golden Swallow (1968).

Years of transformation (1970s)

Mandarin-dialect film in general and the Shaw Brothers studio in
particular began the 1970s in apparent positions of unassailable
strength. Cantonese cinema virtually vanished in the face of Mandarin
studios and Cantonese television, which became available to the
general population in 1967; in 1972 no films in the local dialect were
made (Bordwell, 2000). The Shaws saw their longtime rival Cathay
ceasing film production, leaving themselves the only megastudio. The
martial arts subgenre of the kung fu movie exploded into popularity
internationally, with the Shaws driving and dominating the wave. But
changes were beginning that would greatly alter the industry by the
end of the decade.

The Cantonese comeback

Paradoxically, television would soon contribute to the revival of
Cantonese in a movement towards more down-to-earth movies about modern
Hong Kong life and average people.

The first spark was the ensemble comedy The House of 72 Tenants, the
only Cantonese film made in 1973, but a resounding hit. It was based
on a well-known play and produced by the Shaws as a showcase for
performers from their pioneering television station TVB (Yang, 2003).

The return of Cantonese really took off with the comedies of former
TVB stars the Hui Brothers (actor-director-screenwriter Michael Hui,
actor-singer Sam Hui and actor Ricky Hui). The rationale behind the
move to Cantonese was clear in the trailer for the brothers' Games
Gamblers Play (1974): "Films by devoted young people with you in
mind." This move back to the local audience for Hong Kong cinema paid
off immediately. Games Gamblers Play initially made US$1.4 million at
the Hong Kong box office, becoming the highest grossing film up to
that point, even beating such favourites as the (Mandarin) films of
worldwide kung fu deity Bruce Lee. The Hui movies also broke ground by
satirizing the modern reality of an ascendant middle class, whose long
work hours and dreams of material success were transforming the colony
into a modern industrial and corporate giant (Teo, 1997). Cantonese
comedy thrived and Cantonese production skyrocketed; Mandarin hung on
into the early '80s, but has been relatively rare onscreen since.

Golden Harvest and the rise of the independents

In 1970, former Shaw Brothers executives Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho
left to form their own studio, Golden Harvest. The upstart's more
flexible and less tightfisted approach to the business outmaneuvered
the Shaws' old-style studio. Chow and Ho landed contracts with rising
young performers who had fresh ideas for the industry, like Bruce Lee
and the Hui Brothers, and allowed them greater creative latitude than
was traditional. By the end of the '70s, Golden Harvest was the top
studio, signing up Jackie Chan, the kung fu comedy actor-filmmaker who
would spend the next twenty years as Asia's biggest box office draw
(Chan and Yang, 1998, pp. 164-165; Bordwell, 2000).

Meanwhile, the explosions of Cantonese and kung fu and the example of
Golden Harvest had created more space for independent producers and
production companies. The era of the studio juggernauts was past. The
Shaws nevertheless continued film production until 1985 before turning
entirely to television (Teo, 1997).

Other transformative trends

The rapidly growing permissiveness in film content that was general in
much of the world affected Hong Kong film as well. A genre of softcore
erotica known as fengyue became a local staple (the name is a
contraction of a Chinese phrase implying seductive decadence). Such
material did not suffer as much of a stigma in Hong Kong as in most
Western countries; it was more or less part of the mainstream,
sometimes featuring contributions from major directors such as Chor
Yuen and Li Han Hsiang and often crossbreeding with other popular
genres like martial arts, the costume film and especially comedy (Teo,
1997; Yang, 2003). Violence also grew more intense and graphic,
particularly at the instigation of martial arts filmmakers.

Director Lung Kong blended these trends into the social-issue dramas
which he had already made his specialty with late '60s Cantonese
classics like The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) and Teddy
Girls (1969). In the '70s, he began directing in Mandarin and brought
exploitation elements to serious films about subjects like
prostitution (The Call Girls and Lina), the atomic bomb (Hiroshima 28)
and the fragility of civilized society (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,
which portrayed a plague-decimated, near-future Hong Kong). (Teo,
1997)

The brief career of Tang Shu Shuen, the territory's first noted woman
director, produced two films, The Arch (1970) and China Behind (1974),
that were trailblazers for a local, socially critical art cinema. They
are also widely considered forerunners of the last major milestone of
the decade, the so-called Hong Kong New Wave that would come from
outside the traditional studio hierarchy and point to new
possibilities for the industry (Bordwell, 2000).

1980s-early 1990s: the boom years

The 1980s and early '90s saw seeds planted in the '70s come to full
flower: the triumph of Cantonese, the birth of a new and modern
cinema, superpower status in the East Asian market, and the turning of
the West's attention to Hong Kong film.

A cinema of greater technical polish and more sophisticated visual
style, including the first forays into up-to-date special effects
technology, sprang up quickly. To this surface dazzle, the new cinema
added an eclectic mixing and matching of genres, and a penchant for
pushing the boundaries of sensationalistic content. Slapstick comedy,
sex, the supernatural, and above all action (of both the martial arts
and cops-and-criminals varieties) ruled, occasionally all in the same
film.

The international market

During this period, the Hong Kong industry was one of the few in the
world that thrived in the face of the increasing global dominance of
Hollywood. Indeed, it came to exert a comparable dominance in its own
region of the world. The regional audience had always been vital, but
now more than ever Hong Kong product filled theaters and video shelves
in places like Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and South
Korea. Taiwan became at least as important a market to Hong Kong film
as the local one; in the early '90s the once-robust Taiwanese film
industry came close to extinction under the onslaught of Hong Kong
imports (Bordwell, 2000). They even found a lesser foothold in Japan,
with its own highly developed and better-funded cinema and strong
taste for American movies; Jackie Chan in particular became popular
there.

Almost accidentally, Hong Kong also reached further into the West,
building upon the attention gained during the '70s kung fu craze.
Availability in Chinatown theaters and video shops allowed the movies
to be discovered by Western film cultists attracted by their "exotic"
qualities and excesses. An emergence into the wider popular culture
gradually followed over the coming years.

Leaders of the boom

The trailblazer was production company Cinema City, founded in 1980 by
comedians Karl Maka, Raymond Wong and Dean Shek. It specialized in
contemporary comedy and action, slickly produced according to
explicitly prescribed commercial formulas. The lavish, effects-filled
spy spoof Aces Go Places (1982) and its numerous sequels epitomized
the much-imitated "Cinema City style." (Yang, 2003)

Directors and producers Tsui Hark and Wong Jing can be singled out as
definitive figures of this era. Tsui was a notorious Hong Kong New
Wave tyro who symbolized that movement's absorption into the
mainstream, becoming the industry's central trendsetter and technical
experimenter (Yang et al., 1997, p. 75). The even more prolific Wong
is, by most accounts, the most commercially successful and critically
reviled Hong Kong filmmaker of the last two decades, with his
relentless output of aggressively crowd-pleasing and cannily marketed
pulp films.

Other hallmarks of this era included the gangster or "Triad" movie fad
launched by director John Woo, producer and long-time actor Alan Tang
Kwong-Wing and dominated by actor Chow Yun-Fat; romantic melodramas
and martial arts fantasies starring Brigitte Lin; the comedies of
stars like Cherie Chung and Stephen Chow; and contemporary,
stunt-driven kung fu action epitomized by the work of Jackie Chan.

Category III films

The government's introduction of a film ratings system in 1988 had a
certainly unintended effect on subsequent trends. The "Category III"
(adults only) rating became an umbrella for the rapid growth of
pornographic and generally outr films; however, while considered
graphic by Chinese standards, these films would be more on par with
movies rated "R" or "NC-17" in the United States, and not "XXX". By
the height of the boom in the early '90s, roughly half of the
theatrical features produced were Category III-rated softcore erotica
descended from the fengyue movies of the '70s. (Yang, 2003) A
definitive example of a mainstream Category III hit was Michael Mak's
Sex and Zen (1991), a period comedy inspired by The Carnal Prayer Mat,
the seventeenth century classic of comic-erotic literature by Li Yu
(Dannen and Long, 1997).

The rating also covered a fad for grisly, taboo-tweaking exploitation
and horror films, often supposedly based on true crime stories, such
as Dr. Lamb (1992), The Untold Story (1993) and Ebola Syndrome (1996).

Since the mid-'90s, the trend has withered with the shrinking of the
general Hong Kong film market and the wider availability of
pornography in home video formats (Bordwell, 2000).

Alternative cinema

In this landscape of pulp, there remained some ground for an
alternative cinema or art cinema, due at least in part to the
influence of the New Wave. Some New Wave filmmakers such as Ann Hui
and Yim Ho continued to earn acclaim with personal and political films
made at the edges of the mainstream.

The second half of the '80s also saw the emergence of what is
sometimes called a "Second Wave." These younger directors included
names like Stanley Kwan, Clara Law and her partner Eddie Fong, Mabel
Cheung, Lawrence Ah Mon and Wong Kar-wai. Like the New Wavers, they
tended to be graduates of overseas film schools and local television
apprenticeships, and to be interested in going beyond the usual,
commercial subject matters and styles (Teo, 1997).

These artists began to earn Hong Kong unprecedented attention and
respect in international critical circles and the global film festival
circuit. In particular, Wong Kar-wai's work in the 1990s has made him
the most internationally acclaimed and award-winning filmmaker yet to
come out of Hong Kong.

Mid-1990s-Present: Post-boom

The industry in crisis

During the 1990s, the Hong Kong film industry underwent a drastic
decline from which it has not recovered. Domestic ticket sales had
already started to drop in the late '80s, but the regional audience
kept the industry booming into the early years of the next decade
(Teo, 1997). But by the mid-'90s, it went into freefall. Revenues were
cut in half. By the decade's end, the number of films produced in a
typical year dropped from an early '90s high of well over 200 to
somewhere around 100 (it should be noted, however, that a large part
of this reduction was in the "Category III" softcore pornography area
[Bordwell, 2000].) American blockbuster imports began to regularly top
the box office for the first time in decades. Ironically, this was the
same period during which Hong Kong cinema emerged into something like
mainstream visibility in the U.S. and began exporting popular figures
to Hollywood.

Numerous, converging factors have been blamed for the downturn:

* The Asian financial crisis, which dried up traditional sources
of film finance as well as regional audiences' leisure spending money.
* Overproduction, attended by a drop in quality control and an
exhaustion of overused formulas (Yang, 2003).
* A costly early '90s boom in building of modern multiplexes and
an attendant rise in ticket prices (Teo, 1997).
* An increasingly cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile Hong Kong middle
class, that often looks down upon local films as cheap and tawdry.
* Rampant video piracy throughout East Asia.
* A newly aggressive push by Hollywood studios into the Asian market.

The greater access to the Mainland that came with the July '97
handover to China was not as much of a boon as hoped, and presented
its own problems, particularly with regard to censorship.

The industry had one of its darkest years in 2003. In addition to the
continuing slump, a SARS virus outbreak kept many theaters virtually
empty for a time and shut down film production for four months; only
fifty-four movies were made (Li, 2004). The unrelated deaths of two of
Hong Kong's most enduringly popular singer/actors, Leslie Cheung, 46,
and Anita Mui, 40, rounded out the bad news.

The Hong Kong Government in April 2003 introduced a Film Guarantee
Fund as an incentive to local banks to become involved in the motion
picture industry. The guarantee operates to secure a percentage of
monies loaned by banks to film production companies. The Fund has
received a mixed reception from industry participants, and less than
enthusiastic reception from financial institutions who perceive
investment in local films as high risk ventures with little
collateral. Film guarantee legal documents commissioned by the Hong
Kong Government in late April 2003 are based on Canadian documents,
which have limited relevance to the local industry.

Recent trends

Efforts by local filmmakers to retool their product have had middling
results overall. These include technically glossier visuals, including
much digital imagery; greater use of Hollywood-style mass marketing
techniques; and heavy reliance on casting teen-friendly Cantopop music
stars. Successful genre cycles in the late '90s and early 2000s have
included: American-styled, high-tech action pictures such as Downtown
Torpedoes (1997), Gen-X Cops and Purple Storm (both '99); the "Triad
kids" subgenre launched by Young and Dangerous (1996); yuppie-centric
romantic comedies like The Truth About Jane and Sam (1999), When I
Fall in Love...With Both (2000) and Love on a Diet (2001); and
supernatural chillers like Horror Hotline: Big-Head Monster (2001) and
The Eye (2002), often modeled on the Japanese horror films then making
an international splash.

In the 2000s, there have been some bright spots. Milkyway Image
Productions, founded by filmmakers Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai in the
mid-'90s, has had considerable critical and commercial success,
especially with offbeat and character-driven crime films like The
Mission (2000) and Running on Karma (2003). An even more successful
example of the genre was the blockbuster Infernal Affairs trilogy
(2002-2003) of police thrillers co-directed by Andrew Lau and Alan
Mak. Comedian Stephen Chow, the most consistently popular screen star
of the '90s, directed and starred in Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu
Hustle (2004); these used digital special effects to push his
distinctive humor into new realms of the surreal and became the
territory's two highest-grossing films to date, garnering numerous
awards locally and internationally.

Still, some observers believe that, given the depressed state of the
industry and the rapidly strengthening economic and political ties
among Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, the distinctive entity of
Hong Kong cinema that emerged after World War II may have a limited
lifespan. The lines between the mainland and Hong Kong industries are
ever more blurred, especially now that China is producing increasing
numbers of slick, mass-appeal popular films. Predictions are
notoriously difficult in this rapidly changing part of the world, but
the trend may be towards a more pan-Chinese cinema, as existed in the
first half of the twentieth century.

Notable persons

Directors

* Fruit Chan
* Samson Chiu
* King Hu
* Ann Hui
* Michael Hui
* Wong Jing
* Yuen Woo-ping
* John Woo
* Wong Kar-wai
* Tsui Hark
* Stanley Tong
* Johnnie To
* Patrick Tam
* Stanley Kwan
* Ringo Lam

Cinematographers

* Christopher Doyle
* Peter Pau

Actors

* Alan Tang
* Jackie Chan
* Leslie Cheung
* David Chiang
* Stephen Chow
* Chow Yun-Fat
* Ekin Cheng
* Sammo Hung
* Yuen Biao
* Eric Tsang
* Leon Lai
* Andy Lau
* Anthony Wong
* Bruce Lee
* Tony Leung Chiu Wai
* Tony Leung Ka Fai

Actresses

* Zhi-Gong Chen
* Sammi Cheng
* Maggie Cheung
* Ivy Ling Po
* Linda Lin Dai
* Fung Bo Bo
* Xia Meng
* Michelle Yeoh
* Sally Yeh
* Betty Loh Ti
* Anita Mui
* Michelle Reis

Sexy Girls Blog

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Cinema of Hong Kong

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