Alex Law and Mabel Cheung
Visual China Group via Getty Images
Alex Law, the famed Hong Kong director and screenwriter behind Echoes of the Rainbow, Painted Faces and An Autumn’s Tale, has died. He was 69.
The South China Morning Post reported that Law died Sunday with director Mabel Cheung, his long-time partner and collaborator, by his side.
Along with Cheung, Law was responsible for creating some of the most enduring classics of Hong Kong cinema, including the Cheung-directed Migration Trilogy. The duo’s films were known for their realistic, and somewhat romantic, portrayals of their fellow Hongkongers, offering nuanced views of society as well as the diaspora and tapping into nostalgia for the time before the 1997 handover.
Born Alex Law Kai-yui in 1952, in what was then British Hong Kong, Law studied at the University of Hong Kong, graduating in 1976 with a degree in Chinese and English studies and comparative literature. He went on to study a master’s in film at New York University where he met Cheung. The pair would begin their long and fruitful personal and professional relationship at NYU, taking it in turns to write and direct the features they produced together.
The pair’s breakthrough film was Illegal Immigrant released in 1985, the first entry of what would become the Migration Trilogy that put a spotlight on the plight of the Chinese diaspora that Law and Cheung were very familiar with. The film, written by Law and directed by Cheung, was a drama about illegal immigrants in New York’s Chinatown. The pair followed with the Law-written An Autumn’s Tale in 1987, a New York-set romantic drama set in New York starring Chow Yun-fat, Cherie Chung, and Danny Chan. They closed out the Migration Trilogy with the Sammo Hung-starrer Eight Taels of Gold (1989) which told the story of a man returning to his hometown in China after spending years living abroad as an illegal immigrant.
In 1988’s Painted Faces, Law took over directing duties with Cheung writing in a biopic of Peking Opera legend Master Yu. The film, which starred Sammo Hung in the lead, won Law a best director prize at the 25th Golden Horse Film Awards.
Law and Cheung dabbled in period drama in the well-received biopic The Soong Sisters (1998) which told the story of the Soong sisters, played by Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh, and Vivian Wu, who each married prominent and important figures in the formation of China.
Returning to the nostalgia of their Hong Kong student days, an unfailingly popular theme with the local audience, Law and Cheung released City of Glass in 1998. Released in the wake of 1997 handover, the film struck a chord with Hongkongers looking to an uncertain future. The film would later pave the way for the pair’s Echoes of the Rainbow.
Released in 2010, the Law-directed, Cheung-produced Echoes of the Rainbow, a nostalgia-driven drama set in the 1960s about a working-class family, that Law based largely on his own experience. The film won the Crystal Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Law’s other work includes Now You See It, Now You Don’t (1992), Beijing Rocks (2001), Traces of a Dragon (2003), Night and Fog (2009) and A Tale of Three Cities (2015).