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A Moment of Romance

1990 film directed by Benny Chan

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ2819829 ↗
Source-derived summary

A Moment of Romance (Chinese: 天若有情) is a 1990 Hong Kong action romance film directed by Benny Chan, produced by Johnnie To, and starring Andy Lau, Jacklyn Wu and Ng Man-tat. For his performance in the film, Ng was awarded Best Supporting Actor at the 10th Hong Kong Film Awards.

A Moment of Romance tells an action-packed love story between an underworld rag and a rich heiress and is considered a major classic of Hong Kong cinema.

Because of the film, Andy Lau was nicknamed "Wah Dee" (華Dee), the character he portrays in the film, while the film is also one of Lau's signature works.

Plot

Wah Dee, a young triad gangster in Hong Kong, is the getaway driver in a jewelry store robbery. When the raid goes wrong, he takes a young woman named Jo-Jo hostage. A senior member of Wah Dee's gang, Trumpet, demands that she be killed, but Wah Dee resists and saves her. After Wah Dee is arrested, Jo-Jo refuses to identify him to the police. While Wah Dee tries to act coldly towards Jo-Jo, she expresses gratitude and affection towards him, who, on the other hand, also starts to fall in love with her. Wah Dee hides in his grandfather's home in Macau to protect Jo-Jo from the triads, but she finds him and they spend time together there.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “A Moment of Romance” is 1990 film directed by Benny Chan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Moment, Romance and film, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1990—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1990-01-01. For this dossier, Moment, Romance and film is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “1990 film directed by Benny Chan” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2819829. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “A Moment of Romance”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow A Moment of Romance primary sources, A Moment of Romance archive and Moment research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “A Moment of Romance”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “A Moment of Romance” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.