David Lee Kwong-yiu was born in Hong Kong in 1973. He attended Tang King Po School, then Northfield Mount Hermon in the United States, and took bachelor's degrees at Cornell University and at the School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong; he is one of the few Hong Kong directors with a film education abroad and an international view of film language and production systems. For more than a decade he worked as an assistant director in the teams of Tsui Hark and Andrew Lau, on big productions such as 'Initial D', 'Look for a Star', 'Triple Tap' and 'Confession of Pain', gaining wide experience on large sets and of how Hong Kong-mainland co-productions operate, and learning how to tell a story within a commercial framework. He made his directing debut in 2008 with 'The Vampire Who Admires Me', a serial-killer thriller. In 2015 he wrote and directed 'Insanity', produced by Derek Yee and starring Sean Lau and Huang Xiaoming, a drama about the stigma and discrimination faced by mental-health patients returning to society, in which Lau's recovering patient and Huang's doctor play off each other and the film keeps asking who the real patient is; it won him Best New Director at the 34th Hong Kong Film Awards, still his most prominent honour. In recent years he has directed episodes of the ICAC drama series, including seasons in 2019 and 2022, with an ongoing focus on corruption and social justice, while developing further features. His films stay close to social reality and concentrate on psychological portraiture, told plainly rather than through big set pieces or showy effects.
David Lee belongs to a younger post-war generation of Hong Kong directors who climbed from assistant director to the director's chair. His films avoid spectacle and focus on social subjects such as mental illness and crime. 'Insanity' earned him Best New Director and made him one of the few Hong Kong filmmakers to bring social realism into genre cinema, while his long run directing ICAC drama episodes continues a local tradition of issue-based docudrama.
Achievements
- 2008 · Directed his debut feature 'The Vampire Who Admires Me'
- 2015 · Won Best New Director at the 34th Hong Kong Film Awards for 'Insanity'
- 2019 · Directed episodes of the ICAC drama series