Wei Shiyu (simplified Chinese: 魏时煜; traditional Chinese: 魏時煜; pinyin: Wèi Shíyù; born in Dongying, Shandong) (also credited as Louisa Wei or Louisa Wei Shiyu) is a Chinese filmmaker, film producer, script translator and educator.
Wei Shiyu was born in Dongying City of Shandong Province, but grew up in Xi'an. Her father is from one of the seven prominent families of the early 20th century in Fuzhou City of Fujian Province. The Wei family has one of the earliest overseas students of China, Wei Han (1851–1929), who studied ship building in France from 1875 to 1879 and was the earliest masters of ship building in China. Such a tradition of sending children to study in overseas has continued over several generations in the Wei families. Louisa studied comparative literature and film in Canada from 1992 to 1999, receiving her MA from Carleton University in 1994 and PhD from University of Alberta in 2002.
After working in Japan for two years, Louisa moved to Hong Kong and began to have close contact with people in China’s film circles. In February 2006, she made her first music documentary, Cui Jian: Rocking China, a 35-minute video in retrospection of Cui Jian’s performances from 1986 to 2005. The video was co-produced by Blue Queen Cultural Communicated Ltd. and EMI Music and broadcasted on Channel 13 of Cable TV Hong Kong.
In July 2006, she made her first feature documentary A Piece of Heaven: Primary Documents, a rather personal documentation of her very first documentary experience with Professor Situ Zhaodun of Beijing Film Academy. This film follows Situ’s teaching of Hong Kong students in 2003 and 2005, but meanwhile constructs a brief biography of Situ through his family history. Shanghai based director Peng Xiaolian speaks very highly of the work, calling it “a lyrical prose of a family history shared by many in China, and a work with depth about the very concept of documentation through puzzle pieces of documentary history.”
In November 2006, Wei co-directed a documentary with Xiaolian Peng — a 160-minute epic about the 1955 national campaign initiated by Chairman Mao Zedong and against Hu Feng, a leading literary critic at the time. The film is titled Storm under the Sun and the first film representation of the case. The film is a political saga with impressive historical news reel footages, woodcut prints and cartoons, authentic interviews and stylized animations.
Louisa also has credits as script writer for two feature films released in 2007— Susie Au’s Ming Ming and Xiao Feng’s Gun of Mercy. She has also translated many feature film scripts for award-winning films during their productions. This list includes Mongol (2008), Lust, Caution (2007), Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), and Fearless (2006) among other films in production.
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