Paul Fonoroff

Paul Fonoroff (born 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio) is one of Hong Kong's best known film critics and film historians. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Paul Kendel Fonoroff began studying Chinese in high school, continuing at Brown University and at Singapore’s Nanyang University. Turning his focus to film, he subsequently obtained a Master’s in Fine Arts at University of Southern California, and a grant to research Chinese cinema at Peking University. In 1983 he moved to Hong Kong, where he remained for decades, hosting over a thousand television segments related to film (in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English), and appearing in over twenty movies. He authored over two thousand articles for an array of publications, primarily as movie columnist for Hong Kong's The South China Morning Post from the 1980s to the 2010s.

Some of Fonoroff’s columns from these years have been anthologized in At the Hong Kong Movies: 600 Reviews from 1988 Till the Handover (Hong Kong, 1998). This was preceded by his Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema 1920–1970 (Hong Kong, 1997), a picture book based on Fonoroff's extensive collection of Hong Kong movie memorabilia, which was simultaneously issued in Chinese translation. The collection was later showcased in Chinese Movie Magazines: From Charlie Chaplin to Chairman Mao 1951-1981, included in The New York Times selection of Best Art Books of 2018. In 2016, Fonoroff's collection was acquired by the University of California-Berkeley's CV Starr East Asian Library and christened the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies.

Fonoroff is a member of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society and the Performing Artists Guild of Hong Kong, and advisor to the Hong Kong Film Archives.