Ann Hui's Boat People has spawned controversy from its inception to its premiere at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, and later at the New York Film Festival; reactions--by everyone from individual critics to entire governments--have been strong to Hui's portrait of post-Liberation Vietnam as a land of poverty, tyranny and insufferable pain. It is the Hong Kong filmmaker's fourth film, following two slick thrillers and a first “boat person” film, The Story of Woo Viet (1982), about a Vietnamese refugee trapped in the Philippines. In Boat People, Hui attempts to explain why hundreds of thousands of people have risked their lives to become “boat people” and flee to the supposed safety and freedom of Hong Kong and the West. Hui takes as her protagonist and “impartial witness,” a Japanese photo-journalist (portrayed by popular Chinese actor Lam Chi-cheung) on an extended return to Vietnam as a guest of the Cultural Bureau. He is shown the official society, a vision of healthy children and prosperity, but his involvement with a single family opens his eyes to a struggle to survive that reduces people to prostitution and scavenging off of recently executed corpses. A haunting film that has been both highly praised, and accused of blatant, anti-communist propaganda, Boat People was made with private Hong Kong funding but shot in Mainland China with the cooperation of the PRC government. It is well to remember that the film is not a documentary; as New York Times critic Janet Maslin notes, “its criticism is very much in the service of its clear and simple dramatic needs.... Vivid and disturbing as (its) moments are, they feel like shrewdly calculating fiction rather than reportage.”