Ann Hui

Ann Hui (b. 1947) is not just one of the most respectable filmmakers in the Hong Kong film industry, from where she mostly works. She is also one of the most reputable filmmakers across the Chinese-speaking world, including Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan. Many of her films are multiple award winners at different important film events. She is a six-time winner of the Best Director Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards and two-time winner of the Best Director Award at the Golden Horse Awards. Both ceremonies are extremely prestigious, being the equivalent to the Academy Awards in their respective regions. In 2020, Hui was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, one of the film festivals where her films reach an international audience. Hui’s diasporic upbringing has affected her worldview and humanitarian approach to the topics in her films: she was born in Anshan, China, to an ethnic Chinese father and an ethnic Japanese mother. When Hui was five, she and her family moved to Macau, and later to Hong Kong, where she attended secondary school. She pursued her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. Thereafter, she studied filmmaking at the London Film School for two years before returning to Hong Kong to work briefly as an assistant to martial arts filmmaking guru, King Hu. Hui debuted her film directorship with The Secret (1979), after working at a commercial TV station (Television Broadcasts Limited) and the public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong for a short while. Her importance as a film director started in the late 1970s and early 1980s when she was among the Hong Kong New Wave directors whose films facilitated the development of strong local identities of Hongkongers in the contemporary period. Moreover, Hui is one of the most prolific filmmakers among her contemporaries in the male-dominated Hong Kong film industry, having directed more than thirty films (fiction and non-fiction) to date, over a career of more than forty years. Hui is extremely versatile in her choices of film topics and genres, the latter including political dramas, martial arts films, literary adaptions, ghost films, among others. Her films often stride across the boundaries between commercial and art films. In addition to her directorship, Hui has also assumed other roles in Chinese-language film industries, such as film producer, screenwriter, and actor.