Huang Shuqin (b. Shanghai, 1939), the daughter of Huang Zuolin, a well-known film and stage director of the 1930s and '40s, graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1964 just before the start of the Cultural Revolution, and consequently her career in film-making did not really begin until the late 1970s. Starting as an assistant to veteran director and political survivor Xie Jin, during the 1980s and '90s Huang Shuqin directed or co-directed nearly a dozen feature films, including her debut film Contemporary People (1981), Forever Young (1983) and The Soul of the Painter (1994), as well as Woman, Demon, Human, but from 1990 onwards she increasingly turned to directing TV drama series, in which capacity she has been very successful.