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Journey to Beijing
Evans Chan
Release year: 1998
Run time: 115 minutes
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
A 4-month philanthropic walk from Hong Kong to Beijing, between February 16 and June 15, 1997, became the prism through which writer-director Evans Chan views the rainbow-hued cross-currents of a Hong Kong gearing up for decolonization on July 1, 1997 -- when Britain handed the colony back to China. In this humorous and bittersweet look at the last leg of a sweeping historical journey that dates back to the Opium Wars, Journey speaks to Hong Kong walkers such as an aviator who once flew Deng Xiao Ping, a woman who witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a man testing his love for his wife through separation. Interposed with scenes from the walk as it passes through Mao's birthplace, the Yellow River, Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall are glimpses of a mutating Hong Kong -- entrepreneurs and artists (Helen Lai, Joanna Chan), environmental worries (Christine Loh, Lew Young), and concerns about gay rights (Stanley Kwan, Julian Chan), political exile in California (Lo Fu) and angry democrats (Martin Lee, Lau San Ching) who will stay put...
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.
