While their wider filmography captured the grand sweep of history, some of the couple’s most poignant collaborations offer a more intimate look at migration and memory. Here are two essential Law-and-Cheung films you should not miss.
Eight Taels of Gold (1989)
The third part of Cheung and Law’s “migration trilogy”, directed by the former and scripted by both, follows a homesick New York taxi driver’s return to his hometown in China after 15 years in Chinatown.
The film centres on a failed romance between the cabby (played by Hung) and his distant cousin (Sylvia Chang Ai-chia), with observations about China’s modernisation occurring naturally in the background.
“Nostalgia for the land of one’s childhood is a theme which should strike a deep responsive chord among the people of Hong Kong, most of whom are either one or two generations removed from [mainland] China,” South China Morning Post critic Paul Fonoroff wrote in 1989.