Renowned Hong Kong director Ann Hui will be a prominent guest at this year’s The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, and will be present for the screening of her new film "The Golden Era" at Galaxy Macau’s UA Cinemas on March 21.
It was earlier screened out of competition at the 71st Venice International Film Festival, selected as the Hong Kong entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, and has been nominated for five awards at the upcoming 9th Asian Film Awards (AFA) in Hong Kong, including Ann Hui for Best Director and Tang Wei for Best Actress.
Ann Hui is one of the most distinguished directors from the first new wave of Hong Kong film making that emerged on the international cinema scene during the 1980s. While many of the period’s films were Eastern variations on the popular gangster and action-adventure genres of Hollywood, Hui’s best works have always been more personal in nature.
Born to a Japanese mother and Chinese father in Anshan, Liaoning Province in 1947, Ann Hui has a prolific body of work to date that has seen her recognized around the world. Hui moved to Macau and Hong Kong when she was still a child. She later graduated in English and Comparative Literature from Hong Kong University and spent two years at the London Film School.
She began her career in the late 1970s in a film industry then dominated by Kung Fu movies. Making films in Hong Kong for over 30 years, the director has managed to strike an almost impossible balance between art, politics and commercial success. She has been described as an ‘innovator within the mainstream’, working on relatively low budget productions with Hong Kong stars such as Andy Lau and Chow Yun Fat.
The Secret, in 1979, was Hui’s debut feature film, a thriller based on a real-life murder case and starring famous Hong Kong actress Sylvia Chang. Zhuang Dao Zheng (The Spooky Bunch, 1980) was her venture into the popular ghost story genre in Chinese literature and film. Quing Cheng Zhi Lian (Love in a Fallen City, 1984) was an adaptation of a well-known Shanghai novelette by Zhang Ailing. Hui used the story, set in the days before Hong Kong’s fall to the Japanese in 1941, to comment on the anxiety felt by Hong Kongers about the handover to China 1997.
Her projects then became more ambitious, with the two-part Qing dynasty epic, martial-arts film Shujian Enchoulou (The Romance of Book and Sword/Princess Fragrance) in 1987.
Hui’s films have always revealed a strong sense of history and almost without exception featured strong female characters. The question of exile and the psychological effects on the individual are recurring themes, as she explores cultural displacement, and the effect of being uprooted from one country and culture and planted in another, either by personal choice or political or economic necessity. Hui is especially concerned with how her characters respond to their new surroundings, and how they are affected when they return to their homelands.
Despite her success, Hui expresses a matter-of-fact attitude toward her entire career, claiming that she didn’t plan much of her work. She is often thought of as a film maker who takes an interest in social issues, (The Way We Are in 2008 examined the lives of people living in a poor Hong Kong community), however in an interview at the Berlin International Film Festival the director explained that she distances herself from this label.
“When I shoot films, I don’t worry about ideology. When we choose the subject, we are aware that there might be some ramifications, or the subject might be relevant or something like that. Afterwards when we start shooting, we just get down to the details; the emotional elements, its more important to me to find the right actions and gestures,” she noted.
But she agrees her films are open to a variety of readings.
“I don’t argue with people’s interpretations, I stopped arguing!”
Her latest film, which premiered as the closing film at the Venice Film Festival last year, The Golden Era (2014), centres upon the life of a female writer in 1920s China, Xiao Hong, a story she was drawn to because “her life was very full of incidents”.
This touches upon Hui’s inclination for the melodramatic, and many of her previous works such as The Postmodern Life of my Aunt (2006) and All About Love (2010) also place women in central roles, dealing with themes like mother-daughter relationships and female homosexuality. Yet Hui insists that she does not see herself as someone who wishes to make films for or about women.
“I don’t approach a subject because it is to do with women. My films about women are the ones that get better results. They often say my female characters are well observed, well shot, and well acted, and the male characters are not so well observed. Maybe it stands to reason because I’m a woman, so I have more confidence.”
