Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
New Wave
Tsui Hark belonged to the New Wave, a group of filmmakers of the late 1970s and '80s who
grew up in Hong Kong, and were trained at film schools overseas as well as in local TV.
Their works had a more contemporary sensibility, unlike those of their émigré predecessors,
and were more artistically adventurous.
Ann Hui, Asia's top female director, is a New Waver who has won awards both locally
and overseas. Song of the Exile (1990), a tale about the marriage between a Japanese woman
and a Chinese man just after the Sino-Japanese War, won Best Film at both the Asian Pacif-
ic Film Festival and the Rimini Film Festival in Italy.
The 1970s saw the start of another trend spearheaded by actor-director-screenwriter Mi-
chael Hui, who produced comedies satirising the realities and dreams of Hong Kong
people. Games Gamblers Play(1974) was the highest grossing film of its time, even sur-
passing the movies of Bruce Lee.
International Acclaim
The 1990s saw Hong Kong gaining unprecedented respect on the global film-festival circuit.
Besides Ann Hui, Wong Kar-wai received Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for
Happy Together in 1997. Auteur of the cult favourite Chungking Express (1994), Wong is
famous almost as much for his elliptical mood pieces as for his disregard of shooting dead-
lines. In the same year, Fruit Chan bagged the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Internation-
al Film Festival with Made in Hong Kong , an edgy number shot on film stock Chan had
scraped together while working on other projects.
Once Upon a Time in China(1991) is the first of Tsui Hark's five-part epic that follows folk
hero Wong Fei-hung (Jet Li) as he battles government officials, gangsters and foreign en-
trepreneurs to protect his martial-arts school in 19th-century China.
Tough Times & New Direction
Due to changes in the market, in the 1990s the Hong Kong film industry sank into a gloom
from which it has not recovered. The return to China also presented problems related to cen-
sorship or, more often, self-censorship. But there have been sunny patches, too. Infernal Af-
fairs (2002), directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, made such an impact on its release
that it was heralded as a box-office miracle, though it suffered some loss in translation in
 
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