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The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian
Evans Chan
Release year: 2003
Run time: 72 minutes
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Student rebels, labor organizers, Trotskyites, anarchists, sojourners in Paris, and human rights activists are the cast of real life characters featured in The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian. Based on a stage play, this DV feature traces the poignant trajectory of a rebel whose dream of world revolution first landed him in battles against British colonialism in the 70s, and later, on his death bed in the mid-90s, in agonies over the uncertain fate of a revitalized China. Revealing a little known chapter of rebellion and idealism, Wu Zhong Xian also delves into the radical roots of a generation that included a budding filmmaker named John Woo. Written collectively by Mok Chiu Yu and friends who were close associates of Wu, the play was premiered in the Handover year of Hong Kong in 1997, then traveled to New York's Theatre for the New City in 1998, where the Village Voice hailed it as a "fascinating account" of a radical activist. Veteran independent filmmaker Evans Chan, who initially adapted the play for the New York stage, now offers a Digital Video version that incorporates extensive archival footage, including excerpts from Woo's experimental short "Deadknot." The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian is a timely, resonant docu-drama for today's Hong Kong, China and our ideologically-disillusioned era.
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.
Student rebels, labor organizers, Trotskyites, anarchists, sojourners in Paris, and human rights activists are the cast of real life characters featured in The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian. Based on a stage play, this DV feature traces the poignant trajectory of a rebel whose dream of world revolution first landed him in battles against British colonialism in the 70s, and later, on his death bed in the mid-90s, in agonies over the uncertain fate of a revitalized China. Revealing a little known chapter of rebellion and idealism, Wu Zhong Xian also delves into the radical roots of a generation that included a budding filmmaker named John Woo. Written collectively by Mok Chiu Yu and friends who were close associates of Wu, the play was premiered in the Handover year of Hong Kong in 1997, then traveled to New York's Theatre for the New City in 1998, where the Village Voice hailed it as a "fascinating account" of a radical activist. Veteran independent filmmaker Evans Chan, who initially adapted the play for the New York stage, now offers a Digital Video version that incorporates extensive archival footage, including excerpts from Woo's experimental short "Deadknot." The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian is a timely, resonant docu-drama for today's Hong Kong, China and our ideologically-disillusioned era. 