Fruit Chan Gor (Chinese: 陳果; born 15 April 1959) is a Hong Kong filmmaker who is best known for his style of film reflecting the everyday life of Hong Kong people. He is well known for using amateur actors (such as Sam Lee in Made in Hong Kong, Wong Yau-Nam in Hollywood Hong Kong) in his films. He became a household name after the success of the 1997 film Made in Hong Kong, which earned many local and international awards.
He later enrolled in a one-year film studies course at the Film Culture Society, garnering admission by lying about his secondary education experience and working odd jobs to pay for tuition.[1]
Career
He continued his interest in film later on at the Hong Kong Film Culture Centre, a small film club, where he studied script writing and directing. In 1982, after only one year of working at the Hong Kong Film Culture Centre he started his career in the film industry. He began his career as an assistant director to David Lai Dai-Wai in the film Mid-Night Girls. He later worked as an assistant director to mainstream directors Jackie Chan, Kirk Wong, Ronny Yu, and Shu Kei.[2]
His break came in 1991 when a film he was working with stopped its production. Chan took this as an opportunity; he used the same studio to direct Finale in Blood starring Hong Kong film star Andy Lau.[3] However, the outcome of the first of his own films was highly praised by the critics rather than the public. In 1994 he collected a total of 500,000 HKD and film-materials left over by other productions to begin directing his award-winning Made in Hong Kong.[4] After Made in Hong Kong came out he was thought of as the hope for Hong Kong cinema by fellow Hong Kong filmmakers for challenging the stable model of Hong Kong filmmaking. He had become the first filmmaker to, independently of the big studios, challenge the genre of Hong Kong films and make realistic films about the political and social situations going on in Hong Kong at the time. The film was the first part to a trilogy that included The Longest Summer and Little Cheung.
Chan lists Japanese directors, particularly from the 1960s such as Nagisa Ōshima, as his primary influences. Ōshima specifically was the influence for Chan's film Made in Hong Kong (1997).[2]
Chan's films often focus on the "raw, often bleak, view of life of Hong Kong's working class."[1]
Filmography
As director
Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆) (1993)
The 1997 Trilogy (九七三部曲) (referring to the year of Hong Kong's handover to the People's Republic of China)
