Mok Hong-si

Mok Hong-si (25 December 1908 - 15 April 1969) was a leading Hong Kong director and screenwriter of Cantonese cinema. A native of Tengxian, Guangxi, he graduated in law from Shanghai's Hujiang University and first joined Shanghai's Great Wall Film Company, where his primary-school friend Lee Ying-yuen worked, writing the script for Lee's The Black Shadow (1932). In 1935 he was invited by the Hong Kong Phoenix Film Company to direct the silent film Sunset, but the company went bankrupt before the film could be released. He then managed a cinema in Nanjing, translated for American film companies in his spare time, and briefly joined the film section of the Nationalist government's publicity department. Returning to Hong Kong in 1939, he worked again with Lee Ying-yuen, first as a writer, scripting films including A Beauty of Her Time and A Tale of Aunts and Sisters-in-Law (1939) and Lamp Lighting the Beauty (1940). He made his directing debut in 1940 with the Cantonese film Spring Returns to the Earth. During the Japanese occupation he fled to the mainland, where he acted in stage plays; in 1946 he led a Central Film Studio projection unit in Guangzhou and that same year directed The Flame of Love, the first Hong Kong film made after the war. Mok was celebrated for comedy, his early hits including three films about a character nicknamed Broker La (all 1950) and The Money-Worshippers (1952), co-directed with Lee. He also directed Cantonese comedies as a guest director for MP and GI, and made Mandarin and Cantonese films for the Freedom and Ling Kwong companies (Fragrant Orchid Sister, 1956; Factory Queen, 1963; Student Prince, 1964). With nine veteran directors he formed the Ten Brothers Film Enterprise, which produced a 1964 feature written and directed collectively by the ten. Other works include The Rich Family (1963) and the Bus Silver and Female Killer series (1966-67). His last film was released in 1969. Mok directed about 160 Cantonese and Mandarin films and died in Hong Kong on 15 April 1969.