Enoch Tam

Enoch Tam Yee-lok is a Hong Kong writer, scholar, and film critic. He is the founder of film review website Cinezen, art news website , and the publisher Typesetter Publishing. He is currently an assistant professor at Lingnan University.

Early life and education Tam attended an all-boys secondary school, where he developed an early interest in reading, particularly wuxia and sci-fi novels with his peers. He later pursued studies in computer science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Due to the university's mandatory requirement for students to take humanities electives, he enrolled in courses on poetry and Taiwanese literature, which sparked his interest in literature.

Career Scholarship Tam began writing literary reviews during his MA studies, In 2010, he won first prize in the Hong Kong Public Library's for his literary review essay "Critical Attitude and 'Reoccupation': A Case Study of Ng Hui-bun's 'Stone', 'Mountain', and 'Hunter'". He published his first novel The Happy Times of Blackeye in 2011, a work heavily influenced by Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun's narrative style according to Tam. Two stories from this collection, "Auntie Han's Modern Life" and "The Mushroom Houses Proliferated in District M", were later translated into English by Jeremy Tiang and included in the 2020 anthology That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction. In 2018, he co-edited Indiescape Hong Kong: Critical Interviews and Essays, a collection on Hong Kong cinema, with academics Kenny Ng and Vivian Lee. He also contributed an essay on identity politics in Ann Hui's films to Ann Hui: Forty, an critique collection edited by Cecilia Wong and Stephanie Ng. Vogue Hong Kong Yu Lanlan wrote that Tam "summarized Hui's early films and criticized their insufficient treatment of women's social and cultural inequalities in family and work settings" in his essay.

In 2020, Tam translated Yip Man-fung's essay collection Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation into Chinese. That same year, he publicly criticized the for categorizing the political documentary Inside the Red Brick Wall as Category III and accused them of destroying the submitted disk as an act of criminal damage. After being invited to speak at a post-screening talk of that film in 2021, Tam further criticized that "commercial cinemas have increasingly avoided screening political films". In January 2022, Tam was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries at Lingnan University.

Cultural criticism Tam founded the film review website Cinezen in 2014, serving as its editor-in-chief. He explained that the main reason for founding Cinezen was a "primary focus on films, as films have the ability to reach a wide audience and generate more discussions". Tam is also a member of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, and one of the co-founders of the arts news and literary review website . initially with the aim of publishing Tales of Honey: A Collection of Interviews with Post-80s Directors from Greater China, a compilation of interviews with Hong Kong filmmakers.