“I feel all of your love and care,” he said. “This award doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to us.”
The 36-year-old said he had not imagined winning the award as other contenders were also outstanding.
“There are limited resources [for filming] in Hong Kong, but this should not be an excuse. We should cook the best dish with all the things we have,” he told local media backstage.
He will compete for best director and best new director at the Hong Kong Film Award next month.
Time Still Turns the Pages already won two prizes – best new director and audience choice – at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards last November.
Hong Kong’s Rachel Leung Yung-ting landed her first best supporting actress award with In Broad Daylight.
The 30-year-old actress plays Wong Siu-ling, an intellectually disabled girl at a residential care home who is later sexually abused by the superintendent there.
Sobbing on stage, Leung said she was very thankful to the film’s director, Lawrence Kan Kwan-chun, for trusting and giving her the role.
Thirty-five films from 24 countries and regions in Asia competed for 16 awards, with the ceremony held in Hong Kong for a second year in a row.
Other local films in the running included crime dramas In Broad Daylight and The Goldfinger, as well as wistful coming-of-age drama Fly Me to the Moon.
Competition for the best actor award was fierce, with Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s performance in The Goldfinger going up against mainland China’s Shen Teng, Taiwan’s Wu Kang-ren, South Korea’s Hwang Jung-min and Japan’s Koji Yakusho.
Both Leung and Yakusho have previously won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival in France, while Wu picked two nods at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards for Abang Adik last year.
Yakusho, 68, eventually took the crown.
Mainland China’s Jiang Qinqin, 48, defeated her peer Zhou Dongyu, South Korea’s Jung Yu-mi, Japan’s Rinko Kikuchi and Taiwan’s Audrey Lin Pin-tung in her first nomination to win best actress award for Dwelling by the West Lake featuring rural China.