Jenny Suen is a Hong Kong screenwriter, film producer, and director. Her first feature film as a director, The White Girl, co-directed with the Australian-Hong Kong cinematographer Christopher Doyle, premiered at the BFI London Film Festival. She also produced Doyle's Hong Kong Trilogy, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her Chinese name, 白海, means "White Sea", the strongest of the waves.
Early life and education
Suen was born and raised in Hong Kong, a city that has been the inspiration and backdrop of her last two films. At eighteen, she moved to the United States to study at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated in 2006 with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature, Political Science, East Asian Languages and Civilisation, and a Master of Arts in East Asian Languages and Civilisation, which means she completed four courses of study and two degrees in the typical four years it takes to earn an undergraduate degree. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and was named Dean's Scholar, a distinction only given to nine members of her class. To her, the films are a "homecoming", a search for identity at a critical moment in her city's history and amid vast changes witnessed in Chinese society in the last two decades.
Career
In 2015, Suen produced, a hybrid documentary directed by Doyle, which is a portrait of the city as told by three generations of real Hong Kong people interviewed over the course of one year: children, young people, and the elderly. She raised over US$100,000 on Kickstarter.com to fund the project. The film kicked off a busy festival run after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was released in Hong Kong theatres on September 28, 2015, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Umbrella Movement, which was featured in the film. Upon its theatrical release in the United States, it was named "Film of the Week" by American magazineFilm Comment, described by critic Jonathan Romney as a "three linked semi-documentary vignettes about a location close to the director’s heart—feels as much a community project as a personal statement. It isn’t so much an example of the genre known as the “city symphony”—it's more like a city jam." Suen then went on to direct her first feature film with Doyle, The White Girl, a love story set in the last fishing village of Hong Kong, starring Joe Odagiri and Angela Yuen. Described as a "tropical-noir fairytale", it is set against the backdrop of the fishermen's disappearing culture and way of life, which is considered a metaphor for the many changes happening in Hong Kong at the time. After its 2017 world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, it screened as a special presentation at the Singapore International Film Festival where it was reported as "a very accomplished first feature from Suen, the coming of a new director with the knowhow and potential to add truly unique offerings to Hong Kong’s film canon". It was nominated for a NETPAC award at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. The film was theatrically released in Hong Kong in 2017 and was released in Japan at the end of 2018.
