Reactions by everyone from individual critics to governments were strong to Ann Hui's portrait of post-Liberation Vietnam as a land of poverty, tyranny and insufferable pain. 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/witness a Japanese photo-journalist (portrayed by popular Chinese actor Lam Chi-cheung) visiting Vietnam as a guest of the Cultural Bureau. He is shown the official vision of healthy children and prosperity, but his involvement with a single family opens his eyes to a struggle for survival that reduces people to prostitutes and scavengers. Boat People was made with private Hong Kong funding but shot in Mainland China with the cooperation of the PRC government. Importantly, 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 (some) moments are, they feel like shrewdly calculating fiction rather than reportage."