Set in Vietnam in the aftermath of the war, Boat People follows a Japanese photojournalist who returns to the country and gradually encounters a society marked by poverty, political repression, fear, and displacement. What begins as an assignment becomes a disturbing journey into the human consequences of war and ideology.

George Lam stars as the Japanese photojournalist, and director Ann Hui approaches the material with a remarkable combination of anger and restraint, grounding the film's political scope in the lives of ordinary people caught inside it. 

The film was released in 1982, and then became one of the most acclaimed and controversial Hong Kong films of its era and helped established Ann Hui as one of the essential filmmakers of contemporary Chinese-language cinema. In 2005, it was ranked 8th of 103 best Chinese-language films in the past 100 years in a ceremony commemorating 100 years since the birth of Chinese-language cinema. The list was selected by 101 filmmakers, critics, and scholars.