Boat People

Studio: The Criterion Collection

Feb 24, 2022 Web Exclusive By Joey Arnone

Ann Hui’s Boat People opens innocuously with a parade in Da Nang following the end of the Vietnam War. In a bravura three-minute single-take shot, the camera dips and rises as Japanese photojournalist Shiomi Akutagawa (George Lam) giddily tries to capture every moment with his camera. After a limping boy on the street captures his attention, Akutagawa follows him down an alleyway, taking him to a hidden crevice of Vietnam seemingly miles away from the jubilant and extravagant proceedings down the main street.

The image of the limping boy still lingers in Akutagawa’s mind three years later when back in Vietnam to photograph what post-war life looks like. Unfulfilled by taking pictures of areas he is encouraged to photograph by accompanying government officials, he asks to be given carte blanche and go about the country freely, taking pictures of whatever piques his interest. Thus begins his journey into the Vietnam that government officials did not want him to see.

Akutagawa strikes up a friendship with 14-year-old Cam Nuong (Season Ma), who struggles to make ends meet with her family in one of the country’s “New Economic Zones.” He follows her day-to-day life, which occasionally consists of scavenging the lifeless bodies of newly executed people at a chicken farm. The despair Akutagawa sees in these previously undiscovered areas of the country force him out of being an impartial bystander as he gets caught up in the lives of the people he meets and the kinships he develops.

Part of the then-burgeoning Hong Kong New Wave, Ann Hui’s Boat People created a minor shockwave on the film scene upon its release. Initially competing for the Palme d’Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, the film was pulled out of competition for political purposes, as the committee did not want to upset the Vietnamese government. The film was also met with criticism which alleged that the film was mere Chinese propaganda, as it was made with complete cooperation by the Chinese government and shot in Hainan Island. Its political stance (although director Hui insists the film was created without respect to any political agenda) still proves to be a source of contention for many viewers to this day.

Regardless of how one may judge the film’s politics, Boat People is a masterful cinematic work which effectively entwines social realism with melodrama much in the same vein of Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 Italian Neorealist landmark Rome, Open City. Both films tell emotionally charged stories of human resilience under totalitarianism, utilizing elements of classical cinema to transcend the grittiness of everyday proletariat life.

No matter how ugly the actions on screen become, cinematographer Wong Chung-kei manages to wring a sense of visual beauty out of every frame. In that sense, the film functions like its photojournalist protagonist, inclined to find beauty even in horror. The new Criterion restoration brings out the film’s eye-popping and at times expressionistic use of color, most notably in the garish red neon of the bar which Akutagawa frequents.

Boat People certainly remains an underseen and underappreciated film, but luckily it has received an incredible Criterion treatment. Along with its beautiful restoration, it boasts four whole hours of extras. It includes two 30-minute-long featurettes, one which entails a conversation between Hui and assistant director Stanley Kwan filmed in 2021 and another which consists of a filmed press conference at Cannes from 1983.

Also of interest are two feature length documentaries on director Ann Hui, a prominent figure from the Hong Kong New Wave who perhaps isn’t known in the U.S. as well as other New Wave directors like Wong Kar-wai and John Woo. The hour-long 1997 documentary As Time Goes By features Hui’s ruminations on her relationship with Hong Kong as it was in the process of being handed over by the U.K. to China. The second documentary, Keep Rolling, is a two-hour long comprehensive look at Hui’s filmography, illuminating her understated brilliance as a director who looks to shine a light on the underrepresented.

(www.criterion.com/films/30455-boat-people)

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