The cinema of Hong Kong, once dubbed ‘Hollywood East’, spans over a century and has been home to several great film-makers. But there’s only one name that made it on to BBC Culture’s poll of the 100 greatest foreign-language films: Wong Kar-wai.

Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest foreign-language films:

- The 100 greatest foreign-language films

- What the critics had to say about the top 25

- The full list of critics who participated – and how they voted

- Why are women film-makers 'excluded' from history?

- 12 great foreign-language masterpieces you may not know

Three of Wong’s films are on the list: Happy Together (1997) at 71, Chungking Express (1994) at 56 and In the Mood for Love (2000) at nine, (it also came second in BBC Culture’s 2016 poll of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century). The 209 participating critics from 43 countries decided that despite the long lineage of Hong Kong cinema, Wong is one of, if not the only, Hong Kong film-maker to succeed in crafting a cinematic oeuvre that transcends the boundaries of language and culture.

Hong Kong has been a central character of several of Wong’s films. But what sets him apart from his peers is that he looks at the city with an outsider’s lens. Speaking to Laurent Tirard in Moviemakers’ Master Class: Private Lessons from the World’s Foremost Directors (2002), he described himself not as a director, but "an audience member who stepped behind a camera". Unlike other film-makers who immersed themselves within the city of Hong Kong, such as Johnnie To and Stephen Chow, the distance in Wong’s films allowed him to create a mesmerising, enigmatic cinematic world.