Boat People (Chinese: 投奔怒海; pinyin: Tóubēn Nù Hǎi; Cantonese Yale: Tau ban no hoi; lit.

It recounts the plight of the Vietnamese people after the communist takeover following the Fall of Saigon ending the Vietnam War.

Three years after covering Danang during the communist takeover, Akutagawa is invited back to Vietnam to report on life after the war.

He is guided by a government minder to a New Economic Zone near Danang and is shown a group of schoolchildren happily playing, singing songs praising Ho Chi Minh.

From Cam Nuong, Akutagawa learns the grisly details of life under communism in Danang, including children searching for valuables in freshly executed corpses in the "chicken farm".

He returns to the location where the smiling children were singing for him earlier, and finds to his horror them sleeping unclothed in overcrowded barracks.

The film ends with Cam Nuong and her brother safely on the boat, looking forward to a new life at a freer place.

In the process of making the film, she collected many interviews conducted with Vietnamese refugees about life in Vietnam following the Fall of Saigon.

The People's Republic of China, just ending a war with Vietnam, gave Hui permission to film on Hainan Island.

[7] The film was very successful during its run in theatres, grossing HK$15,475,087,[1] breaking records and playing to packed cinemas for months.

[2] Many international critics found the film powerful, including Serge Daney in Libération, Lawrence O'Toole in Motion Picture Review, and David Denby in New York magazine.

"[3] Janet Maslin in The New York Times observed that Hui "manipulates her material astutely, and rarely lets it become heavy-handed" and that scenes in the film "feel like shrewdly calculating fiction rather than reportage.

[7] The New York Times wrote that the film's harsh view of life in communist Vietnam was not unexpected, given the PRC government's enmity to the Vietnamese.

[15] Hui emphasized her decision to depict the suffering of Vietnamese refugees based on extensive interviews she conducted in Hong Kong.

[7] She insisted that the PRC government never requested that she change the film's content to propagandize against Vietnam and that they only told her that "the script had to be as factually accurate as possible.