Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui will receive the 2026 Camellia Award at the 31st Busan International Film Festival, with the honour recognising a career that has made a lasting contribution to Asian cinema and to the representation of women in film. Busan International Film Festival organisers announced the award on August 11. The ceremony will take place during the festival’s opening night on October 6 at the Busan Cinema Center, with the festival running through October 15.
Presented by the Busan International Film Festival in partnership with Chanel, the Camellia Award was launched in 2024 to recognise filmmakers who have made significant contributions to advancing women in the film industry. Hui becomes the award’s third recipient, following production designer Ryu Seong-hie, who received the inaugural honour in 2024, and Taiwanese actress and filmmaker Sylvia Chang, who was honoured in 2025.
What makes this year’s announcement particularly significant, however, is Hui’s own response to the honour. In her statement, the filmmaker reflected that she had previously been reluctant to accept career-recognition awards because she still wanted to continue making films. Now, approaching 80 and finding it increasingly difficult to make another film, she said the award had arrived at a moment when she could appreciate it more.
The remark carries the weight of a career spent looking forward rather than backward. For much of her life, Hui’s attention remained on the next film rather than on recognition for the films she had already made. The Camellia Award therefore arrives at a different point in her career, giving Busan an opportunity to honour an artist whose body of work has helped shape Hong Kong cinema over several decades.
Hui emerged as one of the central figures of the Hong Kong New Wave, the movement that transformed the city’s cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s through more personal and socially engaged filmmaking. Her feature debut, The Secret, was released in 1979 and established her as a distinctive voice. Over the following decades, she directed 27 features and two feature-length documentaries, many of them focusing on women, ordinary lives and overlooked aspects of Hong Kong society.
Among the films that brought Hui international recognition was Boat People, her 1982 drama about Vietnamese refugees. The film screened at the Cannes Film Festival and became one of the significant works associated with Hong Kong cinema.
Two later films, Summer Snow (1995) and A Simple Life (2011), further established Hui’s reputation. According to the supplied material, they remain the only two films in the history of the Hong Kong Film Awards to win all four major prizes—Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress. Hui achieved the feat twice, once with each film.
Her career has been recognised across the major awards institutions of Asian and international cinema. Hui has won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Director six times, a record cited in the source, and has received the Best Director award three times at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards. In 2020, the Venice Film Festival awarded her the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, while Busan previously named her Asian Filmmaker of the Year in 2014.
The Camellia Award also deepens an existing relationship between Hui and Busan. Several of her films have screened at the festival over the years, and her 2014 Asian Filmmaker of the Year recognition reflected the institution’s longstanding regard for her work. The new honour broadens that recognition by acknowledging not only the films she has directed but also the example her career has provided for women filmmakers in Asia and beyond.
The 31st Busan International Film Festival will take place from October 6 to 15 across venues in Busan, South Korea. Founded in 1996, the festival has developed into a major platform for Asian cinema, international premieres and industry discussions.
For Hui, the 2026 Camellia Award arrives at a moment she herself describes with unusual directness. After nearly five decades of filmmaking, she is receiving recognition not because she has stopped caring about cinema, but because the physical realities of continuing to make films have changed. Her response gives the honour an intimacy that goes beyond a conventional lifetime-achievement tribute.
Busan’s decision to honour Ann Hui therefore recognises not only an extraordinary filmography but a filmmaker whose work has consistently made space for women, ordinary lives and stories that might otherwise remain outside the centre of cinema.
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