Film · Around the world
born 1958 · Hong Kong Chinese
Hong Kong Second Wave; art-house romanticism
Wong Kar-wai is the great stylist of Hong Kong cinema: a director of unrequited love, missed timing and characters who talk to the camera about expiry dates and clocks. He works notoriously without a finished script, shooting for months or years and discovering the film in the edit, and his look — smeared step-printed motion, saturated colour, cramped frames, 1960s Shanghainese exile — is one of the most imitated in modern film. He was the first Chinese director to win Best Director at Cannes.
Two lovelorn Hong Kong policemen, a woman in a blonde wig and a raincoat, and a snack-bar girl who breaks into a flat to clean it while playing 'California Dreamin'' (1994)
Chungking Express — shot in two months as a break from a troubled wuxia epic; Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Pictures released it in the US.
Two neighbours in 1962 Hong Kong realise their spouses are having an affair with each other, and rehearse a betrayal they never commit; it ends with a secret whispered into a hole at Angkor Wat (2000)
In the Mood for Love — Tony Leung won Best Actor at Cannes; Maggie Cheung wears more than twenty cheongsams.
Two Hong Kong men fall apart and back together in Buenos Aires, with a lamp of the Iguazu Falls in their flat (1997)
Happy Together — won him Best Director at Cannes, the first Chinese director to take the prize.
A science-fiction novelist in a hotel room numbered for a year in the future writes about a train from which no one returns with their memories (2004)
2046 — the loose sequel to In the Mood for Love, and part of a sequence begun in Days of Being Wild.
A playboy who calls himself a legless bird, obsessed with one minute on 16 April 1960, and a cameo at the end by a man combing his hair (1990)
Days of Being Wild — a commercial flop on release that is now treated as the beginning of his real career.
A blind swordsman, a woman who drinks a wine that erases memory, and a broker of assassins in a desert inn, loosely drawn from a Jin Yong novel (1994)
Ashes of Time — its troubled production is what produced Chungking Express; Wong re-edited it as Ashes of Time Redux in 2008.
The Wing Chun master who would go on to teach Bruce Lee, fighting in the rain under a hat (2013)
The Grandmaster — a biographical martial-arts film about Ip Man, with Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi.
A mute killer's partner who never meets him, and a man who breaks into other people's shops at night to run them (1995)
Fallen Angels — a companion piece to Chungking Express, shot with extreme wide-angle lenses.