Fong, Allen

(né Fong Yuk-ping/Fang Yuping)

b. 1947, Hong Kong

Film and television director, actor

Allen Fong may be the director who has remained the most faithful to the ideals of the ‘Hong Kong New Wave’ of Western-educated film graduates—such as Ann Hui, Tsui Hark or Yim Ho—who first directed realistic dramas for television in the 1970s before changing the face of Hong Kong cinema.

After studying in the US (1971–5), Fong joined the public television station RTHK where his keen observation of the daily life of ordinary people in Hong Kong produced a series of outstanding works. His first feature film, Father and Son (Fuzi qing, 1981), was a semi-autobiographic rendering of the generation gap in working-class families torn between tradition and modernity. He then directed a couple of critically acclaimed, semi-improvised films. In Ah Ying (Banbian ren, 1982), a young fish vendor with dreams of becoming an actress is asked to play herself. In Just Like Weather (Meiguo xin, 1986), Fong films (and sometimes intervenes in) the ‘road trip’ of a young couple who try to resolve their problems by emigrating to the USA. Dancing Bull (Wuniu, 1991) is one of the first Hong Kong films to deal with the trauma of Tiananmen Square. In the 1990s, Fong went back to television, worked in theatre, taught video workshops in mainland China and directed A Little Life—Opera (Yisheng yitaixi, 1997), a narrative film shot in Fujian province about the loves and lives of an all-women opera troupe. In 2000, he made his first featurelength documentary, Tibetan Tao (Zang Dao), the unconventional report of a trip to Tibet with a Fujianese family.

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