Ann Hui - Career

Career

When Hui returned to Hong Kong after her stay in London, she became the assistant to the prominent Chinese film director, King Hu. Her breakthrough directorial work began with several drama series and short documentaries on 16mm for the Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) television station. During 1977, Hui produced and directed half a dozen films for the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), a Hong Kong organization created to clean up government misconduct. Two of these films were so controversial that they had to be banned from airing. A year later, Hui directed three episodes Below the Lion Rock, which depicts the lives of people from Hong Kong, under the public broadcasting station, Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK). The most recognized episode of Hui’s is Boy from Vietnam (1978), which is the start of her “Vietnam trilogy.”

After a few years in the television industry, Hui finally directed her first feature length film, The Secret (1979). In the 1980s, Hui’s career was growing on the international cinema circuit. The most popular films for that time were Eastern variations of Hollywood oriented gangster and action films. But Hui did not follow the trend and preferred to create more personal films. Many of her best films involved themes pertaining to cultural displacement. In particular, her central characters are often individuals who are forced to relocate to another country and shown to be struggling and learning to survive. Hui tends to explore the characters’ reactions to different environments and their responses to their return home. Her most well-know work, of which falls under this category, is The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People (1982) – the remaining two parts of her “Vietnam trilogy.” Although Hui has directed some generic films, another common theme she works with is family conflict, such as in the film My American Grandson (1990).

One of her most personal work is Song of the Exile (1990), a semi-autobiographical film. The film depicts the story of a young woman, Cheung Hueyin returning to Hong Kong for her sisters wedding after studying film in London for a couple of years. The Hueyin and her mother, who is Japanese, do not seem to have a steady relationship. But as the film follows Hueyin’s journey to her mother’s hometown in Japann, Hueyin and her mother are forced to reexamine each other’s relationship, as both have experienced the issue of being uprooted from one’s own country.

In the 1990s, Hui’s work began to target more commercialized films. Her directing career has slowed down a bit, as she focused more on behind-the-scenes work for other filmmakers. However, the theme of displacement is still recurrent in most of her works. During the mid-1990s, Hui tried to start up a film project about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the reactions of Hong Kong citizens. But the project was never made due to the lack of investments and funding. The term Tiananmen Square massacre is no longer in use by the Chinese government, as it portrays a harsher image of the incident. It is now more recognized as the Tiananmen Square protests or the June Fourth Incident. Throughout her career, Hui has often taken chances to develop more intense and ambitious films, while making a name for herself.

Hui has said in an interview about her desire to work on more socially-conscious projects. She was aware of the difficulties in finding such projects that would both “attract investors as well as appeal to the public.” Her goal was to “present something that is watchable and at the same time attractive” and allow the public to analyze the social issues involved. Although Hui is best known for making controversial films, the interview, in particular, was describing the horrors of increased crime and unemployment rates in Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong. The two films of Hui’s that focus on these issues are The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009), while maintaining a motif of displacement.