Ann Hui, the Hong Kong New Wave pioneer whose films have chronicled the lives of her city’s ordinary and overlooked for nearly half a century, will receive the 2026 Camellia Award at the Busan International Film Festival, presented in partnership with Chanel.
The 79-year-old director will accept the prize — awarded to filmmakers who have advanced the standing of women in the industry — at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 6 at the Busan Cinema Center.
“In my previous years I felt unwilling to receive such taking-stock prizes because I wished to continue making movies,” Hui said in a statement. “Now that I’m nearly eighty and find it difficult to make a film, I think the prize comes just in time for me to appreciate it more.”
Since her 1979 debut The Secret, Hui has directed 27 features and two feature-length documentaries. Her work helped define the Hong Kong New Wave, with films that move across genres but return to her perennial theme — the struggles of everyday life at the margins, portrayed without sentiment: Vietnamese refugees in Boat People (1982), a daughter’s reckoning with her Japanese mother in Song of the Exile (1990), the small dignities of working-class life in The Way We Are (2008), an aging servant and the family she raised in A Simple Life (2011).
