Peter Ho Sun Chan is a Chinese film director, producer and screenwriter.  Regarded as one of the most accomplished and successful Hong Kong filmmakers.

 

Chan is the son of Hong Kong film director turned newspaper columnist Chan Tung Man and mother Lam Man Ying.  After working on several films as assistant director, Chan made his directorial debut with the award-winning Alan and Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye in 1991. Chan followed Alan and Eric with a string of popular box office successes, including He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father (1993), Tom, Dick and Hairy (1993), and He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (1994).

 

In 1996, Chan received international acclaim for Tian Mi Mi (1997 international release: Comrades, Almost a Love Story), a film about two mainland Chinese immigrants who fall in love and drift apart in pre-handover Hong Kong.

 

In 2000, Chan established Applause Pictures, a company dedicated to producing high quality Pan-Asian films intended primarily for Asian audiences. Films produced by Applause Pictures include Jan Dara (2001), One Fine Spring Day (2001), The Eye series (2002, 2004, 2005), Three (2002), Three…Extremes (2004), Golden Chicken (2002), Golden Chicken 2 (2003) and McDull, The Alumni (2006).

 

Chan followed his exploration of the macabre with a turn in the opposite direction with 2005’s Perhaps Love, a musical love story set in Shanghai and Beijing starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Jacky Cheung and Zhou Xun. The film closed the 62nd Venice Film Festival, and was Hong Kong’s official entry for the 78th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

 

In contrast to the lavish production and epic scope of films like Perhaps Love (2005) and The Warlords (2007), Chan’s recent films are stories of hope, friendship and matters of the human heart, themes characteristic of his early work. With American Dreams in China (2013), a rags-to-riches story of three Chinese friends who achieve success teaching English to aspiring Chinese immigrants, and Dearest (2014), based on the true story of a divorced Chinese couple dealing with the abduction of their son, Chan demonstrates an ability to create socially-conscious, humanistic films that are also widely appealing to Chinese audiences. Chan is one of the few Chinese filmmakers working today who can create popular entertainment that explores issues of social concern common to the ordinary Chinese citizen.