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Hong Kong Documentary Film

By Ian Aitken and Michael Ingham

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£100.00

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About this book

A comprehensive study of the lost genre of Hong Kong documentary film

Does Hong Kong have a significant tradition in documentary filmmaking? Until recently, many film scholars believed not. Yet, when Ian Aitken and Michael Ingham challenged this assumption, they discovered a rich cinematic tradition, dating back to the 1890s.

Under-researched and often forgotten, documentary film-making in Hong Kong includes a thriving independent documentary film movement, a large archive of documentaries made by the colonial film units, and a number of classic British Official Films. Case studies from all three categories are examined in this book, including The Battle of Shanghai, The Sea and the Sky, Rising Sun and The Hong Kong Case. In-depth discussion and analysis of more recent Hong Kong independent documentaries focuses on works such as Cheung King-wai's KJ: A Life in Music and films by Tammy Cheung and Evans Chan.

With a particular focus on how these films address the historico-political dimension of their time, Hong Kong Documentary Film introduces students and scholars in Film Studies to this fascinating and largely unexplored cinematic tradition.

Table of contents
Introduction; 1. Hong Kong, Britain China; the documentary film (1896-1941), A Page of History (1941) and The Battle of Shanghai (1937); 2. Hong Kong, Britain China; the documentary film (1947-69), the ‘picturesque’ committed film and Water comes over the Hills from the East (1965); 3. Colonial film: The development of official film-making in Hong Kong (1945-73), the Hong Kong Film Unit (1959-73) and This is Hong Kong (1961); 4. ‘Under Siege’. Public-service broadcasting in an authoritarian setting: The case of Radio Television Hong Kong, and the development of television documentary film in Hong Kong; 5. The documentary films of Radio Television Hong Kong and The Hong Kong Case (1989); 6. Aesthetics and radicalism: An overview of independent documentary film in Hong Kong (1973-2013); 7. A critical analysis of significant independent documentary films of the past three decades: Ed Kong’s Rising Sun (1980); Evans Chan’s Journey to Beijing (1998); Tammy Cheung’s Rice Distribution (2003); Anson Mak’s One Way Street on a Turntable (2007); Cheung King-wai’s KJ: Life and Music (2008) and Louisa Wei’s Storm under the Sun (2011); Conclusions; Bibliography; Index
About the contributors

Ian Aitken

Ian Aitken was a chair professor, and is now an Emeritus Professor, affiliated to Hong Kong Baptist University. His areas of expertise lie in British documentary film studies, the British official film in South-East Asia, and theories of cinematic realism. His most recent book publications include World, Time Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), Cinematic Realism (2020), The Major Realist Film Theorists (ed.), The British Official Film in South-East Asia (2016), and The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia (2016).

Michael Ingham

Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.