The Cinema of Ann Hui
Aesthetics, Gender, and Displacement
The Cinema of Ann Hui
Aesthetics, Gender, and Displacement
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Description
A central figure in Hong Kong cinema since her debut with The Secret (1979), Ann Hui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in 2020. This book explores her distinctive narrative strategies and visual style, with particular attention to gender representation and the depiction of displacement within diasporic communities.
Bringing together essays by an international group of contributors, the volume offers a comprehensive analysis of Hui's filmmaking, from early televisual works such as The Boy from Vietnam (1978), to her recent documentary Elegies (2023). The chapters situate her formal and aesthetic choices within the specific historical and cultural conditions of Hong Kong and its film industry, demonstrating how her cinema is shaped by, and responds to, these contexts.
The book also explores Hui's sustained engagement with gender and sexuality in films including Summer Snow (1995), All About Love (2010) and Our Time Will Come (2017), underscoring her creative agency as a female auteur. By reworking Chinese aesthetic traditions to reimagine femininity and female subjectivity, Hui's films are positioned here as open-ended and multifaceted. In doing so, the volume deepens our understanding of Hong Kong and Chinese-language cinema, the representation of women on screen, and the ongoing reconfiguration of Hong Kong's cultural identity through the work of a globally recognised filmmaker.
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Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
Zhaoyu Zhu, Weiting Fan, and Xueyan Cheng
Part One: Literary adaptations: Aesthetics and historical context
1 A lonely woman warrior: Sounding the book and sword in Ann Hui's historical cinema - Hui Faye Xiao
2 Women, space, and ruins: Chinese painting aesthetics in Ann Hui's Love in a Fallen City - Dailin Zhao
3 Beyond failed adaptation: A postcolonial contextual rereading of Ann Hui's film adaptations of Eileen Chang's fiction - Gabriel F. Y. Tsang
Part Two: Storytelling: Media forms and social change
4 Rescuing humanity: Hong Kong television theory and postrevolutionary intervention in Ann Hui's The Boy from Vietnam - Raymond Tsang
5 Narrative and narrational strategies in Ann Hui's The Way We Are - Gary Bettinson
6 An alternative resistance story: Female subjectivity, theatricality, and the ambiguity of mainland–Hong Kong geopolitics in Ann Hui's Our Time Will Come - Han Li
Part Three: Visualizing Hong Kong females
7 Struggling in between: Hong Kong women as postcolonial subjects in Ann Hui's Summer Snow - Yiran Ai
8 Poeticizing the female body of qi: Lyricism and melancholy in Ann Hui's Tin Shui Wai diptych - Weiting Fan
9 Postcolonial aging, amah, and diaspora in A Simple Life - Jessica Ka Yee Chan
Part Four: Displacement and homeland
10 The position of Hong Kong: On material, space and memory in Ann Hui's Vietnam trilogy - Siao-Yun Chen
11 Exile or vacation? Homeland in Ann Hui's Song of the Exile and My American Grandson - Suk Man Yip
12 Displacement and alienation: Reading Xiao Hong's life of exile through Ann Hui's The Golden Era - Chenfeng Wang
References
Filmography
Index
Product details
| Published | Jul 09 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 328 |
| ISBN | 9781350514478 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 30 bw illus |
| Series | Global East Asian Screen Cultures |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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