Along with Wong Kar-Wai, Stanley Kwan is one of the most prominent directors of Hong Kong's Second Wave. In a national cinema known more for martial arts films than art films, Kwan has created some of Asia's most inventive and complex films of the 1980s and 1990s.
Born in Hong Kong in 1957, Kwan landed a job at the television station TVB after receiving a mass communications degree at Baptist College, with the hopes of becoming an actor. That never panned out; instead Kwan learned filmmaking by serving as an assistant director during the early '80s, to some of the most prominent members of the nascent Hong Kong New Wave, including Ann Hui and Patrick Tam. His directorial debut, Women (1985), starring a pre-John Woo Chow Yun-Fat, was a big box-office success. In this film, as in much of his subsequent work, Kwan presented the audience with a sympathetic exploration of the plight of women, told in a stylistically inventive, often challenging manner. He followed Women with the ambitious Love Unto Waste (1986), which followed the lives of several emotionally damaged professionals. Though the film was a financial failure, it displayed his command of the medium and development of a mature style.…  » Read more