Tang Shu Shuen

Tang Shu Shuen is a former Hong Kong film director. Though her film career was brief, she was a trailblazer for socially critical in Hong Kong's populist , as well as its first noted woman director.

Tang was born in Yunnan province in China. She graduated from the University of Southern California.

Tang's best-known films are her first two, ''The Arch'' and ''China Behind'' . The first film looks at the subjugation of women and their sexuality in a traditional village through the story of a widow's unconsummated passion for a male houseguest. The second follows the harrowing journey of a group of college students trying to cross illegally into Hong Kong from a China torn by the Cultural Revolution.

The bleak portrait in ''China Behind'' of both China and Hong Kong brought upon it a thirteen-year ban by the . In addition to their provocative themes, both films used stylistic devices, such as freeze-frames and expressionistic color, possibly inspired by the European art cinema of the 1960s.

Tang made two more, less noted, films, ''Sup Sap Bup Dup'' and ''The Hong Kong Tycoon'' . She also launched the territory's first serious film journal, ''Close-Up'', in 1976. It stopped publishing in 1979 .

She ceased filmmaking and emigrated to the United States in 1979, becoming a respected restaurateur in Los Angeles. Many critics, however, see her influence in the so-called Hong Kong New Wave of edgy, groundbreaking young filmmakers in the late '70s and early '80s.