The Film Workshop co-founder helped shape Hong Kong cinema's glorious 1980s boom before producing the 2002 classic cop thriller that Martin Scorsese would later remake as the Oscar-winning 'The Departed.'
Nansun Shi, the pioneering Hong Kong producer and executive who helped shape the territory’s cinematic golden age as the co-founder of Film Workshop, and who later produced Infernal Affairs — the cult crime thriller Martin Scorsese would remake as the Oscar-winning The Departed — died Monday at Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital. She was 75.
Film Workshop, the production house Shi launched with director Tsui Hark in 1984, said in a statement that she had been in declining health since 2022 due to complications affecting her immune system, and that recurrent infections in recent months had resulted in “multiple organ dysfunction.” Shi died peacefully at 8:51 p.m. local time with family and loved ones at her side, the company said, adding that memorial and funeral arrangements would be announced at a later date.
Across a career spanning more than four decades, Shi ranked among the most influential figures in Hong Kong film — a key contributor to its glorious 1980s heyday, an architect of its early-2000s revival and one of the first local producers to construct genuine international distribution pipelines for Chinese-language cinema, at a time when few of her peers looked beyond the region. She was also among the earliest Hong Kong producers to shoot in mainland China, in an era when the two industries barely collaborated.
