Infernal Affairs
2002 film directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
Infernal Affairs (traditional Chinese: 無間道; simplified Chinese: 无间道; lit. 'Unceasing Path') is a 2002 Hong Kong crime drama film directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak from a screenplay written by Mak and Felix Chong. The film stars Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Anthony Wong, and Eric Tsang. The film follows an undercover Hong Kong Police Force officer who infiltrates a triad and another police officer who is secretly a spy for the same triad. The film is the first in the Infernal Affairs series, followed by Infernal Affairs II and Infernal Affairs III (both 2003).
At the 22nd Hong Kong Film Awards, Infernal Affairs won seven out of the sixteen awards it was nominated for—including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Leung), and Best Supporting Actor (Wong). It also won in those categories at the 40th Golden Horse Awards and 8th Golden Bauhinia Awards. The film was selected as Hong Kong's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards but was not nominated. Miramax Films acquired the United States distribution rights and gave it a limited American theatrical release in 2004.
American director Martin Scorsese remade the film in 2006 as The Departed, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture as well as Academy Award for Best Director, Scorsese's first and only Oscar in his career, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
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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 Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q714057. 20 of 20 selected statements include explicit references; 20 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Infernal Affairs” 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.