A lot has changed in the past 18 years, according to film director Louisa Wei. In 2001, realising that the female pioneers of Chinese cinema were repeatedly being missed from the history books, she took it upon herself to rewrite the narrative. “There were very few things on women directors. I knew they existed but when you come to study and read about them, they were basically not there,” she says.

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By 2009 Wei had published a book featuring interviews with 27 Chinese and Japanese women directors, as well as several academic journals on the subject of Chinese women in film. She documented the work of women directors like Tazuko Sakane, born in 1904 in Japan, who in 1936 wrote: “I want to portray the true figure of women, seeing from the realm of women.” She also wrote about Chen Bo’er, the actress and perhaps the only Chinese woman working as a producer-director in the 1940s; Tanaka Kinuyo, who made her directorial debut in 1953; as well as Dong Kena and Wang Shaoyan, who were both prolific in the 1960s and 1970s. “[I had] to rewrite the whole film history,” she says.

There was only one major issue: the public wasn’t interested in Wei’s research. “The book basically had no impact, no one was reading that kind of book yet,” she tells BBC Culture.

Despite a slow initial uptake, it turned out her efforts were not in vain. While teaching film classes as an associate professor at City University in Hong Kong, Wei started to notice more and more female students in her audience every year, and they wanted to know about the women who had come before them. Young female filmmakers started reading and sharing her work.