Alula Film Festival

09/25/2026

We wanted to share Justin Chang ‘s sincere and thoughtful introduction to BOAT PEOPLE.

For those who missed our screening, and for anyone discovering Ann Hui, the Hong Kong New Wave, or Asian cinema more broadly, we hope this offers a useful way in. Maybe you’ll come across it and decide to take a chance on BOAT PEOPLE.

If you’ve already seen it and want to learn more, Justin also wrote an excellent essay for the Criterion Collection, “Boat People: Persistence of Vision.”

And if BOAT PEOPLE is your first Ann Hui film, we hope it leads you to many more.

09/16/2026

Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE began taking shape years before the film was made.

In 1978, while working in Hong Kong television, Hui began interviewing Vietnamese refugees arriving in the city. Over the following years, she conducted hundreds of interviews, gathering stories that would eventually inform one of her most important films.

Fellow filmmaker Allen Fong encouraged Hui to look beyond simply feeling sympathy for the refugees and recognize how closely their experiences connected to Hong Kong’s own history of migration. This perspective helped shape her approach to the subject.

Her first exploration of the subject was THE BOY FROM VIETNAM (1978), a television drama for RTHK’s BELOW THE LION ROCK series, about a young refugee attempting to rebuild his life in Hong Kong.

Three years later, Hui returned to the subject with THE STORY OF WOO VIET (1981), starring Chow Yun-fat as a refugee whose journey from Hong Kong takes him to the Philippines, where his hopes for a new life become entangled in violence and exploitation.

Legendary actress Hsia Meng (夏夢), who had come out of retirement to establish Bluebird Movie Enterprises. She backed Hui’s ambitious BOAT PEOPLE with a budget of approximately HK$5 million, giving the screenwriters seven months to develop the screenplay. The film ultimately took three years to complete.

BOAT PEOPLE (1982) completed what became known as Hui’s Vietnam Trilogy. This time, she turned her attention to the circumstances that had driven people to leave their homeland in the first place.

See Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE in 4K restoration on Sunday, September 20 at 5 PM.

The Culver Theater
🎟️ ：https://web.theculvertheater.com/films/Alula-FF-Boat-People/HO00000732

09/15/2026

When BOAT PEOPLE opened in Hong Kong, it was both a major critical and box-office success and the subject of intense debate. Ann Hui maintained that she had made a human story about Vietnamese refugees and the circumstances that drove people to leave their homes, but the film was repeatedly interpreted through a political lens.

That controversy followed the film to Cannes in 1983. BOAT PEOPLE had originally been selected for the main competition, but before the festival, the French government, concerned about its relationship with Vietnam, took the unusual step of requesting a private screening. The film was subsequently removed from competition.

Hui was offered a place in Directors’ Fortnight or the option of showing BOAT PEOPLE as a surprise screening outside competition. She chose the latter.

The controversy continued after the screening. At the Cannes press conference, French critics questioned Hui over the fact that the film had been shot in mainland China only a few years after the Sino-Vietnamese War, with some suggesting that its production circumstances made its portrayal of Vietnam politically suspect. Hui rejected the idea that she had made propaganda and found herself defending both the film and her reasons for making it.

Along for the trip was a young Stanley Kwan, who had worked as Hui’s assistant director on BOAT PEOPLE. With everything going on around the film, one of Kwan’s fondest memories was being thrilled to meet Nagisa Oshima, who was at Cannes with MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE.

Just a few years later, Kwan would emerge as one of Hong Kong cinema’s major filmmakers himself, directing films including ROUGE and CENTER STAGE.

See Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE in its director-approved 4K restoration Sunday, September 20 at 5 PM The Culver Theater

🎟️：https://web.theculvertheater.com/films/Alula-FF-Boat-People/HO00000732

09/10/2026

Before Andy Lau became one of the biggest stars in Hong Kong cinema, he was a young television actor just beginning to make his way into movies. One of his earliest major film roles was in Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE.

Lau plays To Minh, a young prisoner desperate to find a way out. Early versions of the screenplay actually centered the entire film on To Minh and his attempted escape, before Hui reworked the story around George Lam’s photojournalist.

BOAT PEOPLE is widely regarded as one of the early roles that helped launch Andy Lau’s film career. It was an early glimpse of the star Lau would become, from Wong Kar-wai’s AS TEARS GO BY and DAYS OF BEING WILD to international hits like INFERNAL AFFAIRS and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS.

See one of Andy Lau’s earliest major screen performances in Ann Hui’s landmark BOAT PEOPLE, presented in its director-approved 4K restoration.

Sunday, September 20 at 5 PM.
🎟️: https://web.theculvertheater.com/films/Alula-FF-Boat-People/HO00000732

Interview footage is from TIFF 2023

09/08/2026

“One of the most important films in Hong Kong cinema.” — Time Out

Of Ann Hui’s more than four decades of filmmaking, BOAT PEOPLE remains the only one of her films to receive a standalone Criterion Collection release. Criterion calls it “one of the preeminent works of the Hong Kong New Wave,” while Slant describes it as both “harrowing and profoundly human” and a “Hong Kong New Wave triumph.”

BOAT PEOPLE was a major Hong Kong box-office success, won five Hong Kong Film Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and helped establish Hui as one of the defining filmmakers of the Hong Kong New Wave.

Justin Chang praises Hui’s “great formal and conceptual rigor” and the “queasily matter-of-fact detachment” of her framing. Slant highlights the film’s “calm tonality with static compositions and the occasional gentle movement,” calling its approach “harrowing and profoundly human.” The Los Angeles Times has called Hui “a world-class filmmaker of much passion and bravura.”

The film’s focus on displacement, uncertainty and ordinary people navigating forces larger than themselves gave it a lasting resonance with audiences. More than forty years later, that emotional weight remains.

See Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE in its director-approved 4K restoration on Sunday, September 20 at 5 PM.

🎟️: https://web.theculvertheater.com/films/Alula-FF-Boat-People/HO00000732

09/01/2026

One of the defining films of the Hong Kong New Wave, Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE is a stark, deeply unsettling portrait of postwar Vietnam and one of the director’s most powerful films.

George Lam stars as a Japanese photojournalist returning to Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, expecting to document a country rebuilding itself. Instead, he finds poverty, political repression, and people desperate to escape. Hui approaches the material with a remarkable combination of anger and restraint, grounding the film’s political scope in the lives of ordinary people caught inside it.

Released in 1982, BOAT PEOPLE became one of the most acclaimed and controversial Hong Kong films of its era and helped establish Ann Hui as one of the essential filmmakers of contemporary Chinese-language cinema.

See BOAT PEOPLE in a stunning 4K restoration on Sunday, September 20 at 5 PM.

🎟️ in bio

08/25/2026

Just confirmed! 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Our September screening will be BOAT PEOPLE by Ann Hui. 4K restoration, please stay tuned for the ticket page.

08/23/2026

The screening was sold out, but because of high demand, we're going to switch to a bigger auditorium and 100 more tickets will be added. So, if you couldn't get one, try again tonight or tomorrow morning! You should also be able to get one at the theater box office now! Thanks for your support!!

Special announcement🔥🔥🔥🔥: we’re thrilled to add a virtual Q&A with director Wang Tong and actress Yang Kuei-mei following our screening of HILL OF NO RETURN.

Join us for a rare opportunity to meet and hear directly from two defining artists of modern Taiwanese cinema. Yang Kuei-mei is beloved by cinephiles for her work with Tsai Ming-liang and Ang Lee, while Wang Tong’s masterful films remain far less seen and recognized in the United States than they deserve.

HILL OF NO RETURN
August 23 at 5 PM
Followed by a virtual Q&A with Wang Tong and Yang Kuei-mei 楊貴媚Yang Kuei-Mei The Culver Theater

🎟️ ： https://web.theculvertheater.com/films/Alula-FF-Hill-of-No-Return/HO00000698

08/21/2026

In two days!!!! 5 more tickets left! Don’t miss your last chance to this rare screening with virtual Q&A with Wang Tung and 楊貴媚Yang Kuei-Mei ! Moderated by Ryan Swen/孫天行/Sun Tien-hsing

07/15/2026

On Sunday, July 26, we will present Stanley Kwan’s complete 154-minute director’s cut of CENTER STAGE in a new 4K restoration The Culver Theater.

The original 126-minute version that circulated in the United States was shaped by commercial concerns about the film’s length, marketability, and unconventional narrative structure. Much of the documentary material, including exchanges between Kwan, Maggie Cheung, and the cast, was removed to create a clearer, more conventional narrative flow.

The director’s cut restores the film’s more experimental and self-reflexive form, moving freely between period drama, archival footage, documentary testimony, behind-the-scenes conversations, and Maggie Cheung’s extraordinary performance.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Stanley Kwan.

Ticket: https://web.theculvertheater.com/films/Alula-FF-Center-Stage-35th-Anniversary/HO00000694