Chen Kaige is, with Zhang Yimou, the leading voice among the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, the first group of students to have graduated following the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 after the depredations of the Cultural Revolution.
With a handful of international film awards and two Academy Award nominations for best foreign film (Ju Dou in 1990, and Raise the Red Lantern in 1991), Zhang Yi-Mou has emerged as the most distinguished and celebrated of mainland China filmmakers. This success is particularly admirable in view of the fact that, following a promising early education, Zhang was tragically forced to work for ten years as a field laborer during China's notorious Cultural Revolution and was not admitted to the Beijing Film Academy until he was twenty-seven.
Zhang Nuanxin declared that Chinese cinema at the end of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was 20 years behind world filmmaking. Influenced first by the Italian neorealists and then by the French new wave, she and husband Li Tuo co-wrote the controversial essay ?On the Modernization of the Language of Film? in 1979, in which she argued against the prevailing focus on content over form.
Ann Hui is one of the most distinguished directors in the first new wave of Hong Kong film making, which emerged on the international cinema scene during the 1980s. While many of the period?s films are Eastern variations on the popular gangster and action-adventure genres of Hollywood, Hui?s best work is more personal in nature. Her films reflect on cultural displacement, and the effect on individuals who are uprooted from one country and culture and planted in another, either by personal choice or political or economic necessity. Hui is especially concerned with how her characters respond
Internationally acclaimed director Clara Law was born in Macao, China, raised in Hong Kong, and emigrated to Australia as an adult. As a filmmaker, she is an esteemed part of Hong Kong?s thriving and enormously creative film industry. She has been directing films since the mid-1980s, and has proven to be an important, provocative, and inventive director who is praised for her intimate modern dramas. Starting with her student feature film, her work has been screened throughout the world on the film-festival circuit. In addition, she has been characterized as a representative of the so-called
Along with Li Shaohong and Ning Ying, Peng Xiaolian is one of the few women who was graduated from the directing class of the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, and is therefore a member of the acclaimed ?Fifth Generation? of Chinese directors.
