Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan is a Hong Kong film director and screenwriter who teaches at the School of Film and Television of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She graduated from the academy's School of Film and Television in 2001, majoring in sound design, and completed a master's degree in media design and technology at City University of Hong Kong in 2005. In 2008 she finished her first feature, Lovers on the Road, about a young Hong Kong woman who moves to Beijing for love. Her second feature, Big Blue Lake (2011), which she wrote and directed, is set in Ho Chung Village in Sai Kung, where she grew up; starring Leila Tong, Lawrence Chou and Amy Chum, it tells of a city woman returning home to face childhood friends and family, and draws partly on Tsang's own experience. The film earned her Best New Director at the 31st Hong Kong Film Awards in 2012, along with the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild's outstanding new director award and a Special Jury Prize at the 15th Shanghai International Film Festival's Asian New Talent Awards. She continued her Ho Chung-themed work with the interactive online project Ho Chung, the short Ho Chung Landscape, the feature Big Blue Lake and the documentary Flowing Stories, together known as her "Ho Chung quartet"; Flowing Stories follows the villagers' dispersal and reunion and records how the old village changed under urban development, winning a FilmAid Asia humanitarian award. She also directed the feature Scent in 2014, and in 2019 The Lady Improper, starring Charlene Choi and Wu Kang-ren, turned to marriage and bodily autonomy. In recent years she has explored cross-disciplinary work, developing dance-video pieces and virtual-reality projects shown in Europe and North America.
Through the "Ho Chung quartet", including Big Blue Lake and Flowing Stories, Tsang brought rural life and village change to Hong Kong screens and won Best New Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2012. She is one of the few women of her generation to keep making features while also working in documentary and cross-disciplinary art.
Achievements
- 2001 · Graduated from the School of Film and Television of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, majoring in sound design.
- 2011 · Wrote and directed the feature Big Blue Lake, set in Ho Chung Village in Sai Kung where she grew up.
- 2012 · Won Best New Director at the 31st Hong Kong Film Awards for Big Blue Lake.