Yearning for a Wider World Led Ann Hu to Film Directing

Like the protagonist of her film “Shadow Magic,” a photographer in turn-of-the-century Beijing, director Ann Hu became enchanted by the world beyond her borders through film. As an adolescent during China’s Cultural Revolution, Hu, 44, grew up in an isolated nation, where ordinary citizens were expected to limit their cultural intake to the Eight Model Works dictated by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and arts czar.

Hu was the daughter of privilege--her father worked in the Ministry of Propaganda and had translated the workers’ song “Internationale” into Chinese. Thus she managed to see the occasional Western film in private screenings arranged for the inner circle of the political elite.

“Come to think of it, these were not important films at all, but they were a total eye-opening experience,” she recalls during a visit to Los Angeles. She speaks rapidly and vividly, her English still inflected with the R emphasis of the Beijing dialect. The films also whetted her appetite for seeing what the West, especially the U.S., was really like.

“I remember I had a friend who said if there are five airplanes going to America and four of them are doomed to crash, I wouldn’t hesitate to get on any of them,” she says. Hu identified with that yearning, and when she could, she applied to study in the U.S.--one of the first Chinese students to come after the Cultural Revolution. “For me to grab the first chance to come out to see what America really is about was a dream,” she says.

“Shadow Magic,” which opens Friday, is Hu’s first feature film. It’s her valentine to the East-West encounter--starting with a mixture of curiosity and acrimony and ending in tentative reconciliation. It takes place in Beijing in 1902, a time of suspicion and resentment against Westerners, the result of more than half a century of humiliation by Western powers and the twilight of Imperial China.

Liu Jinglun (Xia Yu), the young chief photographer for the Feng Tai Photo Shop, becomes intrigued by the moving-picture show brought to the city by Raymond Wallace (Jared Harris). Unlike the others who are happy to see the images of well-dressed workers filing out of a factory and an oncoming locomotive unfold before them, Liu wants to learn how to project the images and, ultimately, how to make them. His growing friendship with the barbarian and his technology soon alienate him from his boss at the photo shop, as well as from his would-be sweetheart, whose father, opera star Lord Tan, is leery of Western technology.

The story is based on a few known facts: that the first narrative film in China was made by the Feng Tai Photo shop in 1905 and the subject was the Chinese opera “Ding Jung Mountain” as performed by Lord Tan. The rest has been concocted by the original scriptwriters, Huang Dan and Tang Louyi, and Hu herself, who immersed herself in research and rewrote the script. She screened hundreds of vintage clips, looking for the right ones to interweave into her narrative. She also deliberately skirted the harsher social and political issues of the day, such as opium smoking or the decadence of the imperial court, to avoid putting that “smell over everything.”

When Hu first came to the U.S. in 1979, she stayed with a friend in the Bay Area. “For the first two weeks everything was fantastic--the lights, the bathroom, the kitchen,” she recalls.

But euphoria is a temporary state of affairs. After two weeks, a sharp and sobering realization dawned. “Then you realize freedom also means absolute loneliness,” she observes. “You’re totally on your own, you have no one else to blame.”

Eventually, she moved East and got a business degree from NYU. After graduation, she went to work for Elders, an Australian firm, and helped them enter the Asian market. She became a highly successful commodities trader.

But after satisfying her own material requirements, she found she needed more in her life. “I think there are two groups of people,” she says. “One is very happy doing the practical things like making money, buying a house and a car, having a family, raising children. Then there’s another group that would not be very happy living if they were deprived of a way to express themselves--to express themselves is a form of living.”

In 1987 in New York she met the well-respected Chinese director Chen Kaige (“Yellow Earth,” “Farewell My Concubine.”) “I would listen to him telling me about his experiences in filmmaking, his visions for his next projects,” Hu says. “That got my blood going. I knew in my heart whatever he could do, I could, too.”

Three years later, she quit her job, took two years off to travel and to dabble in photography, painting and writing. Then in 1992 she took a two-month intensive course in filmmaking at NYU. Later she went to China to make a film short “Dream and Memory,” which made the festival rounds. When she saw the script for “Shadow Magic,” she decided that it would be her first feature. Along with producer Sandra Schulberg (“I Shot Andy Warhol,” “Angels and Insects”), she spent five years trying to raise the money for it.

When financing didn’t materialize by 1998, Hu plunged into production at the Beijing Film Studio with half a million dollars of her own money. During production, however, two investors decided to join in--Central Motion Pictures of Taiwan and Road Movies Vierte Produktionen of Germany. Later, a New York film lab contributed post-production costs. Today, three years later, the director still seems a bit dazed that the film was made and is being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, which is coming off its record-breaking success with the Taiwanese film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

“Shadow Magic” won the Golden Rooster award in China--the equivalent of the Academy Award--last year, but Hu is frank about her first stab at feature filmmaking. “It’s very mixed,” she admits. “The thing I enjoyed the most was working with the crew. What was devastating was that because I was very inexperienced every day was a failure to me.” Still, she’s pleased with the results and already hoping to launch her next feature, with a more contemporary story line.

“There are things you have to express,” she says. “Otherwise you would not be happy.”