Mette Hjort is Professor and Program Director of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and Professor of Intercultural Studies at Aalborg University in Denmark. She was for many years Director of Cultural Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her most recent book is Small Nations, Global Cinema.

"With Mette Hjort's new book, Stanley Kwan finally gets the sustained and discerning critical regard in English he so justly deserves. Hjort understands Kwan's heroic gamble with history as not simply a self-reflexive exercise, but as a profoundly moving response to the tragedies of modern Chinese and Hong Kong history, among them the great tragedy of Chinese cinema's greatest star." – James Schamus, scriptwriter and producer

Center Stage is widely recognized as a classic of the New Hong Kong cinema, with its fascinating reconstruction of Ruan Lingyu's tragic life as a Chinese film star combined with sequences documenting the making of his film. Whereas many film scholars regard Stanley Kwan's film as an example of the Hong Kong nostalgia film, Mette Hjort shows that Center Stage is better understood as a heritage film that provides a precious cultural resource for rethinking relations between Hong Kong and China.