Painted Faces

A Peking opera school in Hong Kong gets the children up before dawn and works them until midnight. Master Yu Jim-yuen is hard, quick with the cane and without compromise; what he teaches is enduring pain as much as holding a stage. Among his pupils are the boys who would later be known as the Seven Little Fortunes, and three of them would become Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao and Jackie Chan. Directed by Alex Law and co-written with Mabel Cheung, the film is about where Hong Kong cinema came from: the collapse of the opera and the passage of those children into fight scenes. Sammo Hung plays his own teacher and won best actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for it. The film took a number of prizes at the 1988 Golden Horse Awards, including best film and best director.