page_title: Cinema of Hong Kong
section_title: Cantonese movies
hierarchical_section_title: Cinema of Hong Kong / History / The 1940s–1960s / Cantonese movies
caption_attribution_description: English: actress Julie Yeh Feng
context_page_description: The cinema of Hong Kong is one of the three major threads in the history of Chinese language cinema, alongside the cinema of China, and the cinema of Taiwan. As a former British colony, Hong Kong had a greater degree of political and economic freedom than mainland China and Taiwan, and developed into a filmmaking hub for the Chinese-speaking world.
  For decades, Hong Kong was the third largest motion picture industry in the world and the second largest exporter. Despite an industry crisis starting in the mid-1990s and Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997, Hong Kong film has retained much of its distinctive identity and continues to play a prominent part on the world cinema stage. In the West, Hong Kong's vigorous pop cinema has long had a strong cult following, which is now arguably a part of the cultural mainstream, widely available and imitated.
  Economically, the film industry together with the value added of cultural and creative industries represents 5 per cent of Hong Kong's economy.
context_section_description: During this period, Cantonese opera on film dominated. The top stars were the female duo of Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet Sin (Yam–Pak for short). Yam specialised in male scholar roles to Pak's female leads. They made over fifty films together, The Purple Hairpin (1959) being one of the most enduringly popular (Teo, 1997).
  Low-budget martial arts films were also popular. A series of roughly 100 kung fu movies starring Kwan Tak Hing as historical folk hero Wong Fei Hung were made, starting with The True Story of Wong Fei Hung (1949) and ending with Wong Fei Hung Bravely Crushing the Fire Formation (1970) (Logan, 1995). Fantasy wuxia (swordplay) serials with special effects drawn on the film by hand, such as The Six-Fingered Lord of the Lute (1965) starring teen idol Connie Chan Po-chu in the lead male role, were also popular (Chute and Lim, 2003, 3), as were contemporary melodramas of home and family life, including the dramatisation of sibling rivalries in Our Sister Hedy (1957) starring Julie Yeh Feng.
caption: Julie Yeh Feng, an actress, singer and businesswoman. She starred in various films in throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and is considered to have been one of Hong Kong's biggest stars of the period.
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