What is it about?
When I began to teach a course in world cinemas I went in search of representative films spanning countries and cultures, shot on location in places that revealed significant geographies and raised interesting questions about contested histories. By exploring Ann Hui’s 許鞍華 Boat People《投奔怒海》(1982), I aim to better understand the motivations, dynamics, and consequences of the first feature-length movie production linking a Hong Kong filmmaker to the People's Republic of China—a movie that just so happened to engage Vietnam directly, even while pointing toward China itself.
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Why is it important?
In the process, I elucidate a complicated story entangling American, British, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Vietnamese strands, making these links more apparent to scholarly and student audiences. This is a film that reveals itself not only through plot, character, and setting, in its own narrative terms, but also through its sonic and visual registers, and via contextual details of various kinds.
Perspectives
Attending closely to geographical details can make for a more enriching and revealing account of the cinematic arts as they have emerged on the world stage. In carefully considering Ann Hui's Boat People《投奔怒海》(1982) through this lens, I have become more aware of various issues of casting, cinematography, editing, production, promotion, and translation that bring such films into being across cultures and through sometimes contentious collaborations.
Jim Cocola
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
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This page is a summary of: Ann Hui on the Shores of the South China Sea, October 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004728608_009.
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