Film studies: the right spin

What are the chances of finding an award-winning filmmaker on the Hong Kong government's staff list?

Slim, you might presume - until you discover Alex Cheung Kwok-ming's name filed under the Independent Commission Against Corruption's community relations department, where he has been working as a senior producer for the past decade.

It's hard to imagine Cheung as a full-time government employee, given he has long been seen as a cornerstone filmmaker of the rebellious Hong Kong New Wave, and someone whose body of work is peppered with scintillating, subversive fare.

Cheung was behind the cracking 1970s TVB police serial CID, and explosively gritty films such as Cops and Robbers (1979) and Man on the Brink (1981). That he's now overseeing the production of ICAC-backed anti-graft advocacy dramas makes his current standing even more beguiling.

However, Cheung says he's enjoying life at the ICAC. 'I was working on realist dramas at TVB anyway,' he says. 'It's the same now when I work on ICAC Investigators. We get to talk to the real case officers, and we are much closer to the truth as it happened. It's better than making the stories up myself, making assumptions of what life at the ICAC was like ... and the things I hear now are much more captivating and interesting.'

Cheung's first spell on ICAC Investigators was in the early 1990s, when he worked on episodes of two previous instalments of the now 30-year-old serial.