Chinese Filmaker: Ann Hui

Chinese Filmaker: Ann Hui

Ann Hui On-Wah (simplified Chinese: 许鞍华; traditional Chinese: 許鞍華; pinyin: Xǔ Ānhuá; Hepburn: Kyo Anka; born 23 May 1947 to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother) is a Hong Kong film director, film producer and occasional screenwriter, one of the most critically acclaimed amongst the Hong Kong New Wave.

Hui was born in Anshan, Liaoning, China and she moved to Macau, then to Hong Kong when she was five. She studied in St. Paul's Convent School. She studied English language and literature and comparative literary studies in the University of Hong Kong until 1972, when she received her Masters, before spending two years in the London International Film School. Returning to Hong Kong in 1975, she entered TVB as a director, making many serials and documentaries on 16mm. During this time she became King Hu's assistant on television. The most notable featurette she made during this period was Boy From Vietnam (1978), which was her first film on Vietnam and formed the first part of her "Vietnamese trilogy".

Hui left television in 1979, making her first feature The Secret, a mystery thriller based on real life murder case and starring Taiwanese star Sylvia Chang. It was immediately hailed as an important film in the Hong Kong New Wave. The Spooky Bunch (1981) was her take on the ghost story genre, while The Story of Woo Viet (1981) continued her Vietnamese trilogy. Hui experimented with special effects and daring angles; her preoccupation with sensitive political and social issues is a recurrent feature in most of her subsequent films. Boat People (1982), the third part of her Vietnamese trilogy, is the most famous of her early films. It examines the plight of the Vietnamese after the Vietnam War.

In the mid-1980s Hui continued her string of critically acclaimed works. Love in a Fallen City (1984) was based on a novella by Eileen Chang, and the two-part, ambitious wuxia adaptation of Louis Cha's first novel, The Book and the Sword, was divided into The Romance of Book and Sword (1987) and Princess Fragrance (1987). 1990 saw one of her most important works to date, the semi-autobiographical The Song of Exile. The film looks into the loss of identity, disorientation and despair faced by an exiled mother and a daughter faced with clashes in culture and historicity. As in the film, Hui's own mother was Japanese.

After a brief hiatus in which she returned briefly to television production, Hui returned with Summer Snow (1995), about a middle-aged woman trying to cope with everyday family problems and an Alzheimer-inflicted father-in-law. Eighteen Springs (1997) reprises another Eileen Chang novel. Her Ordinary Heroes (1999), about Chinese and Hong Kong political activists from 1970s to the 1990s, won the Best Feature at the Golden Horse Awards.

In 2002, her July Rhapsody, the companion film to Summer Snow and about a middle-aged male teacher facing a mid-life crisis, was released to good reviews in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Her film, Jade Goddess of Mercy (2003), starring Vicki Zhao and Nicholas Tse, was adapted from a novel from Chinese writer Hai Yan.

In 2008, Hui directed the highly acclaimed domestic drama, The Way We Are, which was then followed up by Night and Fog. In an interview with Muse Magazine, Hui explains how she sees the two films as about something uniquely Hong Kong: '(on Night and Fog) I think that this film can represent something; it can express a kind of feeling about the middle and lower class, and maybe even Hong Kong as a whole. Everyone can eat at McDonald's or shop at malls. That's a way of life, but spiritually, there's dissatisfaction, especially with families on welfare. They don't really have any worries about life, but there's an unspeakable feeling of depression.