Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the smallest place on this site and the one with the largest footprint on world cinema, which is an awkward fact to build an index around. This page is the index to what is here: 6 dramas, 8 films, 17 people and 3 guides, each one a record with sourced fields rather than a paragraph of opinion, and all of it linked so a title leads to a face and a face leads back to everything else that person made.

Two things are worth knowing before the first click. The film side and the television side are separate industries with separate audiences. Hong Kong cinema is what travelled: Tony Leung Chiu-wai took the best actor prize at Cannes for In the Mood for Love in 2000, Infernal Affairs was remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed and won best picture at the 2007 Academy Awards, and Jackie Chan rebuilt the action film around stunts performed for real by the man whose name was on the poster. Television went the other way and stayed home. TVB serials ran on one channel to an audience that watched them together, and titles like The Bund and Line Walker are household names in Hong Kong and almost unknown outside the Cantonese-speaking world.

The second thing is the language, and it is not a detail. Everything on this page is in Cantonese, which is a different spoken language from the Mandarin of mainland Chinese drama, not a dialect of it. A Mandarin speaker cannot follow a TVB serial. If a Hong Kong film you are watching sounds unusually smooth, you are probably hearing a Mandarin dub rather than the performances the actors gave, and the original track is usually a menu away.

Where to watch is the question this site answers the same way every time. Every title page carries a "Where to watch" block naming the platforms licensed in your region, whether that is a streaming service or a theatrical release with no stream at all. We do not host anything and we do not link to unlicensed copies. If a title has no licensed platform where you are, the page says so rather than sending you looking.

Cast is where the archive earns its name, and Hong Kong shows it off better than anywhere. An actor is entered once, on the cast list of the title they appeared in, and their profile builds its own filmography by reading that relationship backwards. Open Infernal Affairs, click Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express are already there with the years and the roles, without anyone maintaining a second list. The same happens with Michael Miu, who is in a 1983 wuxia serial and a 2014 crime one, thirty-one years apart on the same page.

Food and language sit alongside the screen records rather than beneath them. The egg tart has a documented route from an English custard tart through Guangzhou, the milk tea is on Hong Kong's intangible cultural heritage list, and the guides here are written to the same standard as the records: sourced, and silent wherever nobody can source it.