“Recently, Hong Kong attitudes have been shifting – if only slightly – and local filmmakers are becoming bolder in their embrace of homosexual themes,” this journalist wrote in 1997.

Kwan was commissioned by the British Film Institute to direct the Chinese segment of its 100 Years of Cinema video series, which gave filmmakers free rein to make a documentary of their choice about the history of cinema in their region.

Kwan chose to make a film about the historical depiction of sexual identity and gender in Chinese-language films. Somewhat courageously for the time, he also used the film as a vehicle to inform his fans that he was gay.

“I thought it was time to let my audience know,” he told this journalist in an interview about the documentary, which was entitled Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, in 1997.

“I have always projected my personal feelings onto the female characters in my films. The documentary shows why I am so interested in male bonding and the feminine aspects of life.”

Although there is a focus on homosexuality in Yang and Yin, Kwan’s exploration ranges far and wide.

He looks at the influence of Confucianism on the depiction of sex in films, and how traditional Chinese attitudes have meant that sexual identity has rarely been foregrounded in movies.

But Kwan also demonstrates that sex and sexual identity were referenced all along in the background, for instance, in the Cantonese opera films of women performers Yam Kim-fai and Pak Suet-sin in the 1950s.

The two performed as a heterosexual couple on screen in films like The Legend of Purple Hairpin, with Yam playing the masculine roles dressed as a man.

Off screen they lived as a couple in a relationship which was devoid of any negative attention from the press or their fans, Kwan notes.

Male bonding is a consistent theme of Chang’s work – in fact, it underpins just about every film he made – and this aspect, coupled with the fact that the actors often fight shirtless in his kung fu films, has led to critics delivering homosexual readings of his work.

In the documentary, Kwan says that he watched Chang’s films as a young man, and was attracted not by the fights but by the well-toned physiques of actors like Jimmy Wang, a glamorous former swimming champ.

Chang, who in the 1960s and 1970s stressed the macho elements of his work, always rejected gay readings of his films, and Kwan allows him a lot of screen time to state his point of view.

The director, who was well schooled in Chinese literature, told Kwan that the “brotherly love” of his films was intended to be entirely platonic, and drew on classical Chinese literature.

“When I started making films, I wanted to do something new, so I tried to see the same old traditions in a fresh way. The traditional Chinese hero has no truck with women, he’s more concerned with his male friends,” he said.

“Such classical architecture is present in the Three Kingdoms. Its heroes are the sworn brothers Liu, Guan and Zhang – they are the epitome of what I wanted to show.

“When they are reading the Three Kingdoms, nobody thinks the heroes are gay, and no one thinks the heroes of [the Chinese classic] The Water Margin are gay. It’s my reading of a Chinese tradition and nothing else,” Chang said.

“Any homosexual feelings in this film are unconscious,” Woo told Kwan. “There may be some, but I’m not sure – I just set out to express emotion very directly. Some things in The Killer could not be expressed verbally, so they are expressed visually.

“I don’t mind how the public reacts to such scenes, as once the film is finished it no longer belongs to me. My original feelings no longer matter, and viewers will develop their own feelings towards it.”

Song at Midnight, a riff on The Phantom of the Opera which was remade in 1995 as The Phantom Lover, starring Leslie Cheung, is about a young revolutionary who experiences torture and disfigurement. Kwan said the film is an example of “the flip side of narcissism”.

“All of Maxu’s films focus on beauty and the face, and most involve scars ruining people’s faces. No other Chinese director focused on beauty and self-indulgence the way that he did.

“There are also mirror images in all of his films – and in all of mine, too,” Kwan told this journalist in an interview.

Ultimately Kwan concludes that Confucian attitudes are probably the reason for the absence of discussions of sexual identity in Chinese films.

Ang Lee, in an interview with Kwan, strongly disagrees with that reading of his films, saying that Kwan has failed to see the irony in them.

“I’m with the progressives, and I treat the issue with a lot of irony,” Lee told Kwan. “Those traditions harm everybody, young and old alike.

“Parents don’t need to be put on pedestals and there is no need for filial piety. Each person is an individual and deserves respect for their sexuality, their pleasures, and everything. They need respect and tolerance.

“This ought to be normal in modern society,” Lee told Kwan.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.