How Hong Kong New Wave director Yim Ho, in films from Homecoming to Red Dust, explored rarely seen sides of China in the 1980s and 90s
- Fellow New Wave filmmakers such as Ann Hui are better known today, but the films Yim Ho shot in the 1980s and 90s were among that era’s most interesting work
- Homecoming contrasts urban Hong Kong life with that in rural China, Red Dust charts an illicit romance, and The Sun Has Ears is an offbeat historical melodrama
Yim Ho is less talked about today than his Hong Kong New Wave contemporaries such as Ann Hui On-wah, but the director made some of the most interesting films of the 1980s and 1990s.
Unusually for a Hong Kong director back then, Yim made his name with a series of films he shot in mainland China – his 1984 drama Homecoming was one of the first films to be shot by a Hong Kong filmmaker there.
Yim studied filmmaking in the UK, and cut his teeth working at Hong Kong broadcaster TVB. He moved into filmmaking with the comedic The Extras in 1978, before establishing his style with Homecoming.
Each of his films set in China is different; they include a social drama, a glossy historical romance, a true-life murder mystery, and even an ethnographical work.
The director, who told the Post he only made his earlier comedies to get a start in filmmaking, has always taken his work very seriously.
“Filmmaking for me is a process in which I am trying to learn more about myself,” he told this journalist in 1995. “I think it reflects the mental state I am going through when I’m making the film.”