Leung Chit-fu (1920–1992) was born in Taishan, Guangdong, and became a film director and screenwriter in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He studied painting and calligraphy and attended the Guangzhou municipal art academy, graduating from the first senior course of the Central Police Academy; he taught art in secondary school during the war, served as a police inspector afterwards and then moved to Hainan's mining bureau, where he handled administration and directed for its affiliated troupe, his first contact with drama. He came to Hong Kong in 1950 to paint cinema billboards and became interested in film through contacts in the Cantonese film world, working as script supervisor, writer and assistant director before co-directing his first Cantonese drama, Bitter Sea Lovebirds, with his cousin Leung Lok-yam in 1958. He later settled in Taiwan, working across Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin productions and directing more than eighty Hokkien films — including The Opium War, Life of Sakyamuni, The Crematorium Mystery and Taipei Street — and joined the Taillian studio in 1963 for about a decade, becoming one of the most prolific Hokkien-film directors of his day. From 1969 he concentrated on Mandarin films; his Chongqing Number One won a special Golden Horse award for national spirit around 1970, and his Seeking Mother for Seventeen Years brought a best-screenplay nomination at the 1971 Asia-Pacific Film Festival, the year he returned to Hong Kong to direct a Cantonese film. Between 1972 and 1982 he ran his own company and directed Mandarin pictures. After his last feature, The King of Hell (1982), he went to the United States for treatment; he gave an interview to the national film archive on 27 August 1992 and died in Taipei on 7 September 1992, aged seventy-one. Beginning as a cinema billboard painter in Hong Kong, he carried Cantonese-film production experience into Taiwan's Hokkien cinema.
Leung moved from sign painting into Cantonese filmmaking, then became one of Taiwan's most prolific Hokkien-language directors with over eighty features before turning to Mandarin cinema. His Golden Horse-winning Chongqing Number One and his later work linked the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries.
Achievements
- 1958 · Co-directed his first Cantonese film, Bitter Sea Lovebirds, with his cousin Leung Lok-yam.
- 1970 · His Chongqing Number One won the special award for national spirit at the 8th Golden Horse Awards.
- 1971 · Seeking Mother for Seventeen Years earned a best-screenplay nomination at the 17th Asia-Pacific Film Festival, and he returned to Hong Kong the same year to direct a Cantonese film.