Cinema of Ann Hui

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.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.

This wonderful collection is as diverse and multi-faceted in its analytical approaches as Ann Hui’s films are! With sections on her literary adaptations, work in different media, Hong Kong women, and the complexities of homeland and diaspora, The Cinema of Ann Hui is the first book in English to offer comprehensive coverage of her oeuvre. Taken together, it opens our eyes to a new understanding of film authorship and creativity as ever-changing and evolving, or rhizomatic, as the editors say.

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsIntroduction Zhaoyu Zhu, Weiting Fan, and Xueyan ChengPart One: Literary adaptations: Aesthetics and historical context1 A lonely woman warrior: Sounding the book and sword in Ann Hui’s historical cinema - Hui Faye Xiao2 Women, space, and ruins: Chinese painting aesthetics in Ann Hui’s Love in a Fallen City - Dailin Zhao3 Beyond failed adaptation: A postcolonial contextual rereading of Ann Hui’s film adaptations of Eileen Chang’s fiction - Gabriel F. Y. TsangPart Two: Storytelling: Media forms and social change4 Rescuing humanity: Hong Kong television theory and postrevolutionary intervention in Ann Hui’s The Boy from Vietnam - Raymond Tsang5 Narrative and narrational strategies in Ann Hui’s The Way We Are - Gary Bettinson6 An alternative resistance story: Female subjectivity, theatricality, and the ambiguity of mainland–Hong Kong geopolitics in Ann Hui’s Our Time Will Come - Han LiPart Three: Visualizing Hong Kong females7 Struggling in between: Hong Kong women as postcolonial subjects in Ann Hui’s Summer Snow - Yiran Ai8 Poeticizing the female body of qi: Lyricism and melancholy in Ann Hui’s Tin Shui Wai diptych - Weiting Fan9 Postcolonial aging, amah, and diaspora in A Simple Life - Jessica Ka Yee ChanPart Four: Displacement and homeland10 The position of Hong Kong: On material, space and memory in Ann Hui’s Vietnam trilogy - Siao-Yun Chen11 Exile or vacation? Homeland in Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile and My American Grandson - Suk Man Yip12 Displacement and alienation: Reading Xiao Hong’s life of exile through Ann Hui’s The Golden Era - Chenfeng WangReferencesFilmographyIndex