| | IFD (International Finance Development) was founded by Joseph Lai San-lun and his wife Betty Chan Kwai-wa in November of 1973, making it one of the oldest film companies in Hong Kong. The company would finance, produce, co-produce and distribute feature films, TV drama series and animated features, specialising in distribution of action films and children animations locally and worldwide.
IFD (International Finance Development) actually began within another company called IFD, this one being Intercontinental Film Distributors Ltd. founded by Terry Lai Siu-ping in 1969 with Filipino producer Bobby A. Suárez (BAS Films). It was here that Terry's brother (Joseph Lai) worked on script writing and translations, but eventually wanted to strike out on his own, creating a new IFD along with his wife Betty and often sharing production duties with his cousin George Lai Chi-ping, IFD was truly a family business.
Towards the end of the 70's Godfrey Ho Chi-keung would join the company and become the official in-house director, shooting around fifteen films per year, with his payment dependant on the number of admissions to cinemas.
It was during this era that the company began using what would come to be known as the “cut & paste” method of film making. This is where films would be bought at a low cost from other countries (such as: Taiwan; South Korea; Thailand; and more), then they would re-design the story to suit a Western market and spend about a week shooting new footage in Hong Kong, usually recruiting Westerners from the Chungking Mansions, again, to appeal to the global market.
They would then edit and merge the original with the new footage, completed with a new English script. The new story would often be focussed around successful movie trends in the West at that point, most notably the Ninja craze of the early 80's, and later kickboxing following the success of the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Kickboxer in 1989.
In 2018 Joseph Lai retired from the film industry after 50 years in the business and sold off IFD and it's entire film catalogue. Now the I.F.D Film Arts And Services company of Toby Russell and George Tan owns the entire IFD, Asso Asia and Adda Audio Visual libraries.
J.J. Hayden [08-03-2025] |
