The Cinema of Ann Hui

Aesthetics, Gender, and Displacement

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Edited by Zhaoyu Zhu, Weiting Fan and Xueyan Cheng

Type

Studies

Subject

Director > Ann Hui

Keywords

Ann Hui, Hong Kong, women, gender

Publishing date

2026 (August 06, 2026)

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 328 pages
6 ¼ x 9 inches (16 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-350-51443-0

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the authors:
Zhaoyu Zhu is a Teaching Fellow in Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. He received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2022.Weiting Fan is an assistant professor at Chongqing University, China. She received her Ph.D. in film theory and film philosophy at King's College London. Her research interests include East Asian cinema, Chinese film theory, and Chinese intellectual histories.Xueyan Cheng is a Ph.D. candidate at the National University of Singapore in the Cultural Studies in Asia Programme. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese cinema and Southeast Asian cinema. She is also a film critic.

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

See the complete filmography of Ann Hui on the website: IMDB ...