Jenny Suen

Suen was born and raised in Hong Kong, a city that has been the inspiration and backdrop of her last two films.

She moved to the United States when she was eighteen to study at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature, Political Science, and 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.[2]

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.[3]

In 2015, Suen produced Hong Kong Trilogy, a hybrid documentary directed by Doyle that 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.[4] She raised over US$100,000 on Kickstarter.com to fund the project.[5] 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 Film Comment, the magazine published by the Film Society of the Lincoln Centre, 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."[6]

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. No mere romance, the "tropical-noir fairytale" is set against the backdrop of the fishermen's disappearing culture and way of life, a metaphor for the many changes happening in Hong Kong today.[7] After its 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, [heralding] the coming of a new director with the knowhow and potential to add truly unique offerings to Hong Kong’s film canon.".[8] It was also 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.

• Jenny Suen on IMDb
• Official website