Alex Cheung Kwok-ming was born in Hong Kong on 22 December 1951, with ancestral roots in Ninghai, Zhejiang, and became a leading figure of the Hong Kong New Wave. Fascinated by the moving image from childhood, he shot numerous experimental shorts on 8mm film as a young man and co-founded the 8mm Film Club with like-minded friends to make and screen films. In 1973 he entered the Hong Kong Experimental Film Competition organised by the Federation of Post-secondary Students and won three of its five prizes with shorts such as The Telephone Ring, and the same year another 25-minute short, a different-world piece, was invited to a festival in Iran. His work caught the eye of the director Chor Yuen, who invited him to write scripts. He then joined Rediffusion Television making promotional films and TVB's film unit, producing television drama episodes including CID, Young People and various mystery and documentary strands. Moving to features in 1979, he directed his debut, Cops and Robbers, produced by Teddy Robin and Leung Lee Siu-har; its realistic style and strong box-office result helped open the New Wave alongside early works by Tsui Hark and Ann Hui. His 1981 Man on the Brink turned the undercover-cop story into a study of a man torn between the police and the triads, and won Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Leading Actor at the 19th Golden Horse Awards, with Ai Di taking the acting prize; it is widely regarded as the prototype of the Hong Kong undercover thriller and was later named by Asiaweek among the hundred greatest Chinese films of the twentieth century and by the Hong Kong Film Archive in its 2011 list of 100 must-see Hong Kong films. Invited by Shaw Brothers, he directed the science-fiction film Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in 1983, followed by Danger Has Two Faces (1985) and Imaginary Suspects (1988). His lens often settled on marginal youth, law enforcers and the city's darker corners, carving out a realist crime path within the New Wave. From 1996 he made dramas for the ICAC and formally joined the ICAC in 1998 to help produce its films.
The System and Man on the Brink opened a realistic crime-and-police path for the Hong Kong New Wave; Man on the Brink is widely seen as the prototype of the local undercover drama, a theme later taken up by films such as Infernal Affairs.
Achievements
- 1979 · Directed his first feature, Cops and Robbers, produced by Teddy Robin and Leung Lee Siu-har, which was a box-office success.
- 1982 · Won Best Director at the 19th Golden Horse Awards for Man on the Brink.
- 1983 · Directed the science-fiction film Twinkle Twinkle Little Star after joining Shaw Brothers.