Boat People (1982)

ACTION! - FEMALE 4FRONT: THE HUI'S PERSPECTIVE Hui once again proves she can be a very eclectic filmmaker with a film that honestly was the type of movie I thought she would do when I saw that picture of her while searching for a director to do a marathon on. Tender,…

Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine

Ann Hui's horror movie look into post war Vietnam. It has Hui's usual empathy, but is far moodier than its realist reputation might suggest. One of the film's key concepts is turning Lam's Japanese photographer into a blank, a vessel for images, but someone whose journey is…

Filipe Furtado

One of the preeminent works of the Hong Kong New Wave, Boat People is a shattering look at the circumstances that drove hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to flee their homeland in the wake of the Vietnam War, told through images of haunting, unforgettable power.…

Criterion

"Why do u photograph people? They are so ugly"

Filipe Furtado

Revolution is war is hell. Something in the air with the Hong Kong New Wave and Japanese leftists in 1982. Patrick Tam's Nomad envisions the United Red Army as psychotic dead-enders while Ann Hui here depicts an idealistic photojournalist who sees past the Potemkin images…

Sean Gilman

The story behind Boat People is fascinating: it was shot in Hainan, becoming the first Hong Kong production to film in mainland China, with the permission of a PRC government that had recently fought a war with Vietnam, and was therefore eager to capitalise on…

ablackie

The Vietnam War was a protracted 2-decade war fought between North Vietnam & the Viet Cong and the US-backed South Vietnam, the US later directly intervening in 1964 following a false flag attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. The US had previously offered financial support for…

KAZCORE

One of the more blunt and brutal depictions of forced migration and post-war reconstruction I think I've ever seen. A work of clear-eyed and empathetic misery grounded in the perspective of a foreign photojournalist in order to give an observational naturalism and realism…

Josh Lewis

The contrast between the freshly painted, not lavish but nonetheless clean and statically filmed interiors of officials and the rawer shooting of areas still marked by a half-century of war and destitution hints at how hastily the facade of normalcy has been erected, which…

Jake Cole