In September 2020, a 73-year-old woman with grey hair and thick-rimmed glasses walked onto the stage of the Venice Film Festival and became the first Chinese female director in history to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. She looked slightly uncomfortable in the spotlight. Then she said, in her characteristically unfussy way, that she was surprised anyone thought her career deserved a lifetime prize — she was still trying to figure out how to make a good film. That's Ann Hui. Six-time Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards, quiet legend of the Hong Kong New Wave, and the Cantonese filmmaker most likely to describe herself as "still learning."
The Girl from Manchuria Who Became Hong Kong's Most Awarded Director
Ann Hui was born on 23 May 1947 in Anshan, Liaoning province in northeastern China. Her father was Chinese, her mother Japanese — a fact she didn't fully understand until adulthood, and one that would later shape her most personal film. In 1952, the family moved to Macau, then to Hong Kong. She grew up in Cantonese-speaking neighbourhoods, attended St. Paul's Convent School, and earned a Master's in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Then she did what almost no young Cantonese woman in the early 1970s did: she flew to London to study film. If you like your Cantonese-cinema references worn on the outside, our 靓爆鏡 Mirror Breaks sweatshirt is a nod to the same on-screen glamour Ann Hui grew up watching.
Her Cantonese Roots
Ann Hui is Cantonese in the most important sense: she has spent her entire artistic life listening carefully to how Hong Kong people talk, move, and quietly suffer. Her films are almost never loud. She doesn't do explosions, action set pieces, or the mo lei tau nonsense-comedy that defined Stephen Chow's box-office reign. Instead, she films the people you actually see at a wet market or on the MTR — amahs, ageing bachelors, refugees, mothers, retirees. She lets them speak Cantonese slowly, in full sentences, without translating them into palatable Mandarin for the mainland market. That refusal to compromise is one of the most Cantonese things about her.
Four Stories You Probably Haven't Heard
🎬 She Started By Making Anti-Corruption Films for the Government
Before Ann Hui was a New Wave icon, she was a young TVB director in the mid-1970s making dramas and documentaries on 16mm film. In 1977, the newly formed Independent Commission Against Corruption — the Hong Kong body cleaning up rampant police graft — hired her to direct half a dozen dramatised episodes about real corruption cases. It was gritty, socially urgent work, and it taught her something no film school could: how to shoot the city's real streets under time pressure. That documentary instinct never left her.
🚢 Boat People Was Kicked Out of the Cannes Official Competition
Ann Hui's 1982 masterpiece Boat People — the third and most powerful film in her Vietnam Trilogy — was invited to compete at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Then France, keen to rebuild diplomatic ties with post-war Vietnam, quietly removed it from the Official Competition and demoted it to "Surprise Film" status. Ann Hui got the international attention anyway. The film became one of the most talked-about Hong Kong films of the decade and cemented her reputation as a director unafraid to point the camera at difficult political truths.
If Ann Hui's Vietnam Trilogy is the serious side of 1980s Hong Kong cinema, the era's glossier, gambling-hall-blockbuster side is captured by our 賢神 God of Gamblers hoodie — a tribute to the same golden-age energy Ann Hui shared box-office space with.
📝 Song of the Exile Was Her Own Life on Screen
In 1990, Ann Hui made Song of the Exile — the story of a Hong Kong daughter and her Japanese mother struggling to understand each other across a language and a war neither of them chose. It was, almost undisguisedly, her own story. She had grown up not fully understanding her mother's silences until she was old enough to piece together what it meant to be a Japanese woman in post-war Chinese society. The film is one of the most quietly devastating things ever made in Cantonese cinema, and it won her the first of many Best Director trophies.
🏆 She Holds the Record No One Will Beat
Ann Hui has won Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards six times — more than any other director in the ceremony's history. She is also the only director to have completed the "Grand Slam" of Hong Kong film awards. Her wins span four decades and every genre she's ever attempted, from Song of the Exile and Summer Snow to A Simple Life and The Golden Era. When she received the Venice Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2020, she became the first Chinese woman ever to hold the honour.
Her Cultural Legacy
Ann Hui matters because she proved that a Cantonese film could win at Venice without pretending to be anything other than a Cantonese film. She made A Simple Life (2011) about an ageing amah in a rented Hong Kong flat and it won Deanie Ip Best Actress at Venice. She made The Golden Era about a Chinese poet nobody outside academia had heard of. She kept refusing to make films the way the market told her to, and the market kept giving her prizes anyway. Every young Cantonese filmmaker — especially every young Cantonese woman filmmaker — is walking a road she cut through the industry with a smaller machete than anyone else was allowed to carry. If that Cantonese pride resonates, our 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY oversized tee is the wardrobe equivalent.
A Cantonese Word to Remember Her By
Ann Hui was one of the founding directors of the movement that gave Hong Kong cinema its own voice. The Cantonese word for that movement is worth learning.
新浪潮
san1 long6 ciu4 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: "New Wave" — the late-1970s Hong Kong filmmaking movement that brought European art-cinema sensibility to Cantonese storytelling.
Explanation: The Hong Kong 新浪潮 directors — Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Patrick Tam, Allen Fong, and a few others — came home from film school abroad in the late 1970s and refused to make the studio-formula films Hong Kong had been churning out. They shot on location, cast unknowns, and told Cantonese stories on 16mm. It changed everything.
Why She Still Matters
In a Cantonese cinema culture that historically rewarded action heroes and comedy kings, Ann Hui built a body of work by simply pointing a camera at ordinary people and refusing to look away. She's still working, still resisting the pull of easy stories, still speaking Cantonese in interviews when she could switch to Mandarin for a bigger audience. For the global Cantonese community — the diaspora kids in Vancouver and Toronto and London who grew up watching her films on VHS with their grandmothers — Ann Hui is proof that the quiet stories, told in our language, in our accent, on our streets, can travel anywhere in the world without losing what makes them ours.
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