Ann Hui

Forty years of Hong Kong go through Hui's films, and the people she puts in front are the ones the city keeps off its ledger. A Vietnamese refugee waits for papers to America in The Story of Woo Viet. A widower loses himself to Alzheimer's and his daughter-in-law does the nursing in Summer Snow; a single mother on a public estate looks after her son and her elderly neighbour in The Way We Are; a maid who has served one family her whole life has a stroke and asks for a place in a home in A Simple Life. Rent and wages get said out loud, the camera stays back, and you finish caring about somebody you would have walked past.

Signature

• Plain technique; the camera declines to editorialise.
• Older women carrying the film, filmed without sentimentality.
• Housing, wages and paperwork given documentary attention.
• Political rupture registered through what happens at home.