Keung Hing-lung (born 1928) is a film editor born in Shanghai to a family from Ningbo, Zhejiang, and educated at the Sanyu Public School in Shanghai. He came south to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1948 and, through the introduction of Wang Sun-fu, supervisor of the Nanyang Film Company, entered the Nanyang studio, where he first learned film printing and then specialised in editing. The first film he cut was a Cantonese picture, Some Day I Will Make It (1948). He joined Shaw & Sons Ltd as a film editor in 1956, and in 1958 won Best Editing at the 5th Asian Film Festival for Li Han-hsiang's Diau Charn, becoming the first Hong Kong editor to take the prize; at the same festival the film also took Best Director (Li Han-hsiang), Best Actress (Lin Dai) and Best Screenplay (Kao Li), Keung's cutting being part of that award-winning package. Over the next three years he won the same award at the festival with Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong) Ltd's The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959), Back Door (1960) and Les Belles (1961), completing a run of four consecutive wins. He also won Best Editing at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards four times, for Yang Kwei-fei (1962), The Love Eterne (1963), Sons of Good Earth (1965) and New Adventures of the Thirteen Eagle (1978). His credits span Huangmei opera, melodrama and martial-arts films, among them The Enchanting Shadow (1959), The Swallow Thief (1961), Come Drink with Me (1966), The Kid with a Tattoo (1980), Killer Constable (1980) and Love in a Fallen City (1984). As Shaw released dozens of films a year in the 1960s, he ran the studio's editing department through a heavy workload. For many years its head, he trained editors such as Cheung Yiu-chung and Leung Wing-chan, brought Hollywood pacing to Mandarin cinema and helped establish professional cutting standards in Hong Kong.
A pioneer of Hong Kong film editing, Keung was the first local editor to take the Asian Film Festival's Best Editing prize, in 1958, and went on to win it four years running. As long-time head of Shaw's cutting department he trained a generation of editors and brought Hollywood pacing to Mandarin cinema.
Achievements
- 1958 · Won Best Editing at the 5th Asian Film Festival for Diau Charn, becoming the first Hong Kong editor to take the prize
- 1961 · Won Best Editing at the 8th Asian Film Festival for Qian Jiao Bai Mei
- 1979 · Won Best Editing at the 16th Golden Horse Awards for The Avenging Eagle