The Cinematheque

“Hui is justly reckoned as second only to King Hu in [Hong Kong] as a stylist, a storyteller, and an explosive movie innovator.”

Harlan Kennedy, Film Comment

Filmmaker Ann Hui (b. 1947) has forged a career like no other in the history of Chinese-language cinema. Across four decades and 27 solo-directed feature films, she has transcended genre categories and national boundaries. After apprenticing under the legendary wuxia director King Hu and training in nonfiction at the television station TVB, Hui emerged alongside Tsui Hark and Patrick Tam as a key figure in the Hong Kong New Wave. Distinct from the approaches of those two directors, Hui fearlessly integrated currents of history, politics, and national identity in a direct way with her ​“Vietnam trilogy” and in her adaptations of literature, particularly works by Eileen Chang.

Hui is often identified as a humanist, perhaps because her work for the most part concentrates on contemporary life. Her films lucidly trace the partially obscured codes that shape what’s possible to be thought and acted upon in any given era—for women, activists, migrants, and heroes. She is also a distinctly postwar artist. Her master’s thesis was on the nouveau roman iconoclast Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Hui’s boldest moves as a filmmaker can be seen in the films where she freely charts cinematic modes of time and space in the modernist tradition. A great deal of her work concerns the impossibility of returning home again, a paradox that she knows is politically and materially concrete, but also belongs to the terrain of memory and imagination.

The Cinematheque, the Chinese Canadian Museum, and the SFU Department of World Languages and Literatures, with support from the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative and the Asian Independent Cinema Showcase, are proud to welcome Ann Hui for a special two-night engagement in which she will present a pair of her key masterworks. The award-winning director will introduce her recently restored Boat People, and discuss her career in the context of Song of the Exile.

“A world-class filmmaker of passion and bravura.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times