August 15, 2014
"Nobody in Hong Kong Had Dared to Touch It”: An Interview with Patrick Lung Kong

An article about a great filmmaker. The L Magazine, August 15. Thanks go to series curator Aliza Ma for research help.

This piece is published on the occasion of the film series “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: The Cinema of Patrick Lung Kong,” which begins today in New York at the Museum of the Moving Image. The Hong Kong virtuoso’s first North American retrospective contains seven of the thirteen films that he directed, along with one produced by him (Patrick Tam’s San Francisco-shot Love Massacre) as well as John Woo’s film A Better Tomorrow, a remake of Lung Kong's The Story of a Discharged Prisoner

A Better Tomorrow was produced by Tsui Hark, who is also a director known for films such as Peking Opera BluesOnce Upon a Time in China, and Time and Tide. Hark will appear with Lung Kong on the opening night of the Moving Image retrospective to present him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lung Kong, with customary cheer, told me his feelings about Hark: “He is a real filmmaker, and he knows a lot about motion pictures!”

Aliza Ma discusses Lung Kong’s work below:

Aliza Ma: Patrick Lung Kong’s output marks a turning point in Hong Kong cinema between changing historical and social milieus and aesthetic and economic impulses. In the 1960s, after the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China, the Hong Kong studios began making Mandarin-language films for export, and Cantonese-language filmmaking almost ceased completely until the early 1970s. Lung Kong was one of a few filmmakers that responded with an ardent mission to bring the Cantonese language and local culture into theaters. At a time when filmmaking was a swift assembly line, he worked as an iconoclast, taking his time and carefully crafting a series of uniquely human films.