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Datong: The Great Society
Evans Chan
Release year: 2011
Run time: 115 minutes
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Accompanied by his daughter Kang Tung Pih (Lindzay Chan), the great southern visionary Kang Youwei (Liu Kai Chi) arrived in Sweden in 1904 and began a four-year sojourn on an idyllic island. A political fugitive from China's Qing dynasty, Kang and his disciple Liang Qichao (Ben Yeung) had organized China's first attempt at modern political reform in 1898, and built China's first political party in exile. Kang met US President Theodore Roosevelt twice as a result of the anti-American boycott (1905-1906) he orchestrated to protest the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act. Kang's most formidable challenge, though, was to convince his compatriots to modernize China by reforming the Manchu monarchy, rather than unleashing a violent revolution as championed by Dr. Sun Yatsen.
Datong: Great Society depicts the controversial career of a poet-politician-philosopher, whose writings would find an admirer in Mao Zedong. Yet, it was Kang's revival of the Confucian utopia, Datong (The Great Society) that may turn out to be his enduring legacy. Renowned Chinese/Swedish theatre artist Chiang Ching narrates this sweeping epic. Out of director Evans Chan's inventive blending of theatricalization and documentary, Mary Stephen, longtime editor of Eric Rohmer, shapes a bold and illuminating film about a Chinese century torn by ethnic discord and violent revolutions.
Director biography
EVANS CHAN (www.evanschan.com), originally from Hong Kong, is a New York-based artist, critic, librettist and an independent filmmaker of four fiction narrative and twelve documentary films -- including Crossings (1994), Journey to Beijing (1998), Adeus Macau (2000) The Map of Sex and Love (2001), Bauhinia (2002), The Life and Times of Wu Zhongxian (2003), Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), and The Rose of the Name: Writing Hong Kong (2014) -- which have been screened at the Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Moscow, Vancouver, AFI-Docs, Seattle and Taiwan Golden Horse film festivals, among others. His directorial debut To Liv(e) (1991) was listed by Time Out Hong Kong (March 2012) as one of the 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films. His docu-drama about China’s pioneering constitutional reformer, Kang Youwei, Datong: The Great Society, received the 2011 Chinese-language Movie of the Year Award, presented by the PRC’s Southern Metropolitan Daily, for “returning fuller memories and humanity to Chinese history.” Chan subsequently adapted his Datong film into the libretto for Datong: The Chinese Utopia, presented by the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2015, toured London in 2017, and praised by Bachtrack as “a major new opera.”
Chan’s latest films include, Love and Death in Montmartre, premiered at the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival in 2019 as a Best Film nominee, and his two-part documentaries chronicling Hong Kong’s upheaval from 2014-2020 – Raise the Umbrellas (2016) and We Have Boots which, upon its world premiere at Rotterdam, was praised as artful and powerfully moving.”
UCLA professor Michael Berry called Chan “one of the most singularly innovative and diverse figures in the Chinese cultural world” and according to British film critic Tony Rayns, “Chan has made a singular contribution to Hong Kong cinema and at the same time a major contribution to the whole spectrum of contemporary film-making.”
A contributor to Critique, Asian Cinema, Film International, Postmodern Culture, Cinemaya, and various anthologies, Chan is the editor/translator into Chinese of three books by Susan Sontag. Postcolonalism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan, a critical anthology about Chan’s works, was published by the Hong Kong University Press in 2015.
Chan obtained his PhD in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University in 2014. He taught at the Master in Cultural Studies in Lingnan University (Hong Kong) in 2019, and has been a visiting assistant professor at the Humanity and Media Studies Department in Pratt Institute, NYC.
