Louisa Wei was born in China during the Cultural Revolution but mainly grew up in China's Post Mao era. She left China in 1992 to study literature and film in Canada. In 2001, she moved to Hong Kong and has been making documentary films there since 2003. During the past 13 years, she has been teaching film production, story writing, and media culture courses at City University of Hong Kong. Her oeuvre as a documentarian includes the short musical Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006, DV, 35 minutes) broadcasted on Channel 13 of Cable TV Hong Kong the feature length Storm under the Sun (2009, DV, 139 minutes), which premiered at IDFA in 2007 and, then, in a vastly revised version at the HKIFF in 2009. Her most recent feature documentary is Golden Gate Girls (a.k.a. Golden Gate Silver Light) sponsored by the Hong Kong Art Development Council.
Storm under the Sun has not only received warm feedback from audience members and film critics, but has also been viewed by historians and sinologists as a rare effort and an in-depth representation of Mao's first nation-wide purge of writers. Partially sponsored by International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam, Storm has been written about and reviewed in journals in as many as five languages. It is currently housed in the permanent collections of three museums, two archives, and over 60 university libraries worldwide.
Golden Gate Girls portrays the life and times of Esther Eng, once honored "China's first woman director." The documentary has received positive reviews and attention from The Hollywood Reporter, Voice of America, South China Morning Post, Film Business Asian, etc. Elizabeth Kerr of The Hollywood Reporter praised the documentary for "its seamless ability to weave history, Sino-U.S. relations and social standards together to allow for inference and context."
Wei makes historical documentaries from an explicitly personal perspective as a means to advocate for significant figures and voices lost to historical process. She plays the simultaneous roles of director, writer, and editor, not to establish a singular subjective viewpoint, but to ensure that life and the people in her films are presented intact, with all the complexity and failings of human intellect and sense.
BQCC
