Shi Nan-sun, a Hong Kong producer and executive who co-founded Film Workshop and helped establish an international distribution network for Chinese-language films, died on Monday at a Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital. She was 75 years old.
Film Workshop said in a statement that Shi had been in declining health since 2022 due to complications affecting his immune system, and that a recent infection had caused “multiple organ failure.” The company announced that she passed away peacefully at 8:51 p.m. local time on July 13, surrounded by her family, and memorial and funeral details will be announced at a later date.
Ms. Shi’s path into the industry was through Hong Kong television, where she worked in the mid-to-late 1970s before Cinema City Studios hired her as executive director in 1981, responsible for the young company’s overseas sales and festival strategy at a time when Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest still dominated the local market. Three years later, she split from director Tsui Hark, whom she would marry in 1996 and divorce in 2014, to form their own organization, Film Workshop, giving Tsui the foundation for a project too idiosyncratic for Cinema City’s commercial status.
Under that banner, Mr. Shi has built a production and distribution track record from 1984’s “Shanghai Blues” to genre classics such as “A Better Tomorrow” and the “Once Upon a Time in China” series, pushing Hong Kong titles into markets in Southeast Asia, Europe and North America long before it became standard practice for local studios. Her scope later expanded beyond film workshops. While working at Media Asia, she produced 2002’s Infernal Affairs, a film that Martin Scorsese would remake four years later as The Departed. She also worked with Bona Film Group on titles such as the “Overheard” series and “A Simple Life,” and has run distribution company Distribution Workshop with Jeffrey Cheung since 2007. Her debut credits include “A Simple Life” in Venice in 2011 and “Bends” in Cannes in 2013. Her last producer credit was on Tsui Hark’s The Legend of the Condor: The Galants in 2025.
His body of work has won honors on three continents. France appointed her an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2013, and she subsequently received the Berlinale Camera Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Far East Film Festival in Udine. She also served on the jury of the Berlin Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. In 2025, Shi Hark and Tsui Hark jointly received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards, ending a partnership that has shaped Hong Kong’s film industry for more than 40 years.
