Ruby Yang was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to the United States in 1977. She first built a career as an editor before turning to documentary directing. Her editing credits include Wayne Wang's The Joy Luck Club, Joan Chen's Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl — for which she was nominated for Best Editing at the 35th Golden Horse Awards — along with Autumn in New York and The Last Aristocrats. In 1999 she directed her first documentary, Citizen Hong Kong, following families who emigrated around the 1997 handover. In 2003, with Thomas F. Lennon, she founded the China AIDS Media Project to address HIV/AIDS in mainland China through film, producing documentaries and public-service advertisements that carried prevention messages to the public. Her 2006 documentary The Blood of Yingzhou District, about children in Yingzhou, Fuyang, Anhui, who had lost their parents to AIDS, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2007; she returned to the children a decade later. Her 2008 film Tongzhi in Love looked at gay life in mainland China, and The Warriors of Qiugang was nominated for the same Oscar in 2011. In 2014 she directed the feature documentary My Voice, My Life, following underprivileged students staging a musical; distributed by Andy Lau's company, it took over HK$5 million at the box office and won her the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild's Best New Director award in 2015. Based in Beijing and Hong Kong, she founded the Hong Kong Documentary Initiative to nurture local documentary-making.
Yang turned her camera on AIDS orphans, gay mainlanders and underprivileged Hong Kong students, bringing rarely discussed subjects to international platforms such as the Oscars; the China AIDS Media Project and the Hong Kong Documentary Initiative she founded advanced HIV prevention publicity and local documentary training.
Achievements
- 1998 · Earned a Best Editing nomination at the 35th Golden Horse Awards for Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl
- 1999 · Directed her first documentary, Citizen Hong Kong, following families who emigrated around the handover
- 2007 · Won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for The Blood of Yingzhou District
- 2015 · Won the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild's Best New Director award for My Voice, My Life