Film Legend Sylvia Chang is For the People

In 1972, when Sylvia Chang Ai-chia was in her last year of high school, she filmed The Flying Tiger, her first screen role. “I remember very clearly because I used to think I would be a singer,” she recalls. She fell into the part in Shu Liu and Sheng Tang’s action film by accident, after popular actor Tien Feng saw her singing on Taiwanese television and recommended Chang to a producer who was always on the lookout for new talent. He cast her as Wang Kuan-hsiung’s co-star. Right then and there, Chang’s life clicked into place. “The minute I walked onto the set I just felt very comfortable,” she says. “I had no fear and no camera shyness. I thought, ‘This is where I belong.’”

In filmmaking circles, Chang is a legend. That’s a word that can be thrown around too easily but in Chang’s case it’s no understatement. She has over 50 years in the film business and 120 credits as a director, writer, producer and actor. She has collaborated with heavyweight directors Jia Zhangke, François Girard and Ang Lee, among many others. She’s served on juries for both Venice and Berlin film festivals, as chair of the Golden Horse Executive Committee and on the board of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. In May 2025, she received the Golden Mulberry from the Far East Film Festival in Udine, and in September she accepted the Camellia Award during the landmark 30th Busan International Film Festival. Chang is a lodestar for emerging filmmakers in Asia, especially women, and is among the first directors from the region to break out of the art house ghetto globally as part of Hong Kong’s New Wave. 

She’s a true industry titan. But tell her that and she boggles a bit. “I’ve never thought that – until people started telling me that,” she laughs. Far from feeling like the icon she is, she sometimes wonders if she isn’t still starting out. “There’s so many new things happening in film and I just want to learn more,” she says. 

For decades, the directors from Asia garnering broad international attention were film school subjects such as Satyajit Ray or Yasujiro Ozu, or niche artists familiar to other filmmakers thanks to Cannes. But as home video and cable television gave average moviegoers more ways to see films from different places, filmmakers from Hong Kong and across the region started landing on many a curious movie buff’s radar. Chang was among the earliest.

From Hollywood’s margins to Hong Kong’s main stage

A native of Taiwan and resident of Hong Kong for the past 47 years, Chang shares a Tsuen Wan office with her husband, a wine and spirits dealer. The boardroom doubles as a dining room; the long welcoming table facing a wall is lined top to bottom with rare whiskies. The rest of the space is dotted with books, art and props from various films. On the morning we speak, Chang, now 72, cosies up on a sofa in her corner of the office, youthful, engaged and casual in red trousers, sneakers and a simple black tee. After a few minutes it becomes clear her films are very much a reflection of Chang’s connective personality and generous spirit, but she’s matter-of-fact and down to earth when it comes to work. 

“If you’re part of the film business, you’ve got to respect the business, otherwise you just fall into the junk pile,” she states bluntly. “For me, it’s about the work and interesting projects. I turn down projects where I might earn a lot of money, but I’m uninterested.”

She unapologetically left Madonna, Sean Penn and the dreadful script for Shanghai Surprise at the Peninsula; when it was released in 1986, it turned out to be a commercial and critical flop. “I don’t know whether a lot of young people can do that now,” says Chang. “A lot of young directors are too eager to become famous. Everybody wants to be seen. Of course the first film is important, but the second film is more important.”

Chang nonetheless feels a sense of obligation to those young filmmakers, and nurturing art in general. Chang set up the GOSH art foundation in Taipei over 30 years ago, originally to support AIDS education for high school kids, and now art education in general for younger kids. On the filmmaking front, she’s quick to mentor or produce emerging directors, most recently dedicating three years to developing and producing first-time feature director Kung Siu-ping’s Measure in Love (2025). 

“I help new directors because I was new once too,” she says. “When I became chair of Golden Horse, my team asked me what award I wanted to present. I wanted to present Supporting Actress. I started as a supporting actress.”

Despite earning the female-focused Camellia Award in Busan, Chang doesn’t consider her work feminist. “I’ve never considered myself a feminist,” she says. “I don’t want to be labelled as anything. I always say that I’m a woman; I don’t know how to be something else. If you want to label me, that’s your business, but I am who I am. The stories I tell are how I see the characters; they relate to my own experience. That’s inevitable.” 

She doesn’t see herself as a Hong Kong or Taiwanese filmmaker, either. “Sometimes I wonder, ‘Am I from Hong Kong? From Taiwan?’ I don’t think it really matters. I’m also a wife, a mother and a daughter. My mother is 98 years old, and she’s making me work,” she finishes with a chuckle. “At my age I don’t want to think about titles.”

None of that should be mistaken for a lack of conscience, however. Chang’s international career unofficially kicked off in 1979 when she landed a role on mega-hit American sitcom MASH. (“It’s funny but I sometimes still get some money from that,” she quips.) She was visiting Los Angeles with her first husband and a studio tour ended in a lucky break: a table read for the show’s producers. Her character on the episode “Ain’t Love Grand” was Sooni, a Korean prostitute. The producers liked her work enough to start working on a union card for Chang, and for a moment she flirted with staying in Hollywood. But not only was she newly married, of a potential Hollywood career, “I thought, ‘Okay, but what kind of roles do I get?’ Korean hookers, China dolls, and what else? Not much.”

She pushed back on the idea and headed home to Taipei. Before long, Golden Harvest in Hong Kong signed her to a contract – which she broke in 18 months. But she was on her path.

The breakthrough years

The Hong Kong New Wave was bubbling when Chang had her first taste of movie stardom with Eric Tsang’s action comedy Aces Go Places in 1982. She is now almost universally recognised for her emotional, romantic dramas, so it’s easy to forget she broke out in a humorous role. “I think comedies are the most difficult scripts to write and roles to play, but I was very blessed,” she says. “[It] changed how people looked at me. They said, ‘Oh, she’s funny!’”  

Aces may have opened more doors, but 1989 proved to be the year she cemented her place in Asian cinema, starring in Sammo Hung’s Eight Taels of Gold, then-emerging director Johnnie To’s All About Ah-Long with Chow Yun-fat, and Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York alongside Maggie Cheung. (By then, she had also directed three features, including Once Upon a Time in 1981 and Passion in 1986.) 

Ah-Long stands out as a stark lesson in connecting with audiences Chang has respected ever since. To was keen to direct the story about a low-income single dad (Chow) who reunites with his son’s estranged mother (Chang). The film proved to be a huge hit and To’s first significant success – to everyone’s surprise. 

“I still remember the day it released. We were so scared, and in the afternoon everybody was just sitting in the office waiting for news. Then somebody came in and said there was a long queue at the cinema. We said, ‘For which film?’ Ours. We were thrilled, but when we went out for dinner that night we were advised not to laugh too much, or smile too much. The other filmmakers were downstairs. Those were the gangster days so we didn’t want to upset them,” she laughs.

For her, the film’s success is a lesson in trusting a filmmaker’s vision. “You never know what audiences want. It’s very sad, because nowadays everything is numbers. Young audiences have replaced judgement with numbers,” she laments. Chang happily refers to herself as “old school” and is pleased to see the theatrical experience hasn’t gone away yet, thanks to some among those young audiences rediscovering the community elements, film stock aesthetics and classics – kind of like how she herself recently rediscovered Charlie Chaplin.

Directing with heart

Chang has since used her star status to put women in the spotlight, as a director in films such as her breakout Siao Yu (1995), about a Chinese immigrant in a marriage of convenience in New York; 20:30:40 (2004), an examination of women at various life crossroads, each section written by the actor of that age; Tempting Heart (1999), in which a Hong Kong director reminisces on her first love; the reunion of estranged siblings in Murmur of the Hearts (2015); and Love Education (2017), which examined the private and public rifts that opened when a woman tries to relocate her father’s grave to be next to that of her dying mother. 

As an actor, producer or both, Chang has shepherded Yonfan’s Bishonen (1998), Lee Chatametikool’s Concrete Clouds (2013), Anastasia Tsang’s A Light Never Goes Out (2022) and Huang Xi’s multi-generational drama Daughter’s Daughter (2024), in addition to Measure in Love, which is opening in October. Without being duplicates of each other, Chang’s films examine the fragility of the bonds we create and the lingering impact of disrupting them, especially on women, whatever those bonds may be. 

Which is not to say Chang has never stepped out of her comfort zone. She adapted her own stage play Office into a 2015 musical for Johnnie To and was ahead of the curve with Princess D (2002), about a game coder that creates a virtual idol based on a bartender he meets. The film was an early examination of the blurred line between reality and digital fantasy, and it was most definitely not in Chang’s wheelhouse. 

“It took me almost a year to make that,” she remembers. “The technology wasn’t as advanced [as now] and we just had to keep trying, trying, trying to get it right. The teeth!” she exclaims, throwing up her hands. She agreed to make the film with co-writer Alan Yuen after reading a newspaper article predicting only a matter of time before television news was read by digital avatars. “I was shocked and scared. It’s like what’s happening with AI now, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, what is this new technology?’” Though the industry still doesn’t have a handle on how artificial intelligence is going to affect filmmaking, Chang isn’t worried. “One thing AI doesn’t have is warmth,” she says.

No matter the genre or subject, Chang’s work is marked by accessibility – both emotional and formal. She avoids easy tricks like “needle drops,” the insertion of popular songs to force sentiment, and she resists leaning too heavily on dialogue, often urging young filmmakers to show rather than tell. At times, she admits it can be difficult to step back and simply play the role without guiding a director. Yet whether performing or shaping a story herself, it is this commitment to resonant storytelling that has made Chang an icon.

“When you say, ‘What’s your style?’ I think mine is a sense of humour,” she says. “I make comedy-dramas. I tend to turn sad situations around and look at how you can get out of it. No director can avoid adding themselves. It’s in there. It’s in the blood. It’s very much me in all my films.”