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Born in China, raised in Hong Kong, Evans Yiu Shing Chan is a
critic, dramatist, and award-winning director of two feature films: To
Liv(e) (1991) and Crossings
(1994). His last film, Journey to Beijing (1998),
a '99 Berlin Film Festival "Forum" selection, is "a
remarkable feature-length documentary [that] offers the all-round
best account of the issues
surrounding the hand-over of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997."
(Sight & Sound)
Chan has been compared by British film critic Tony Rayns to
the French avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker. He is "
the most intellectual of the current crop of Hong Kong directors,
" wrote Barry Long in Hong Kong Babylon
(1997, Faber & Faber). Gina Marchetti, author of Romance
& the "Yellow Peril," (1993,
University of California Press) describes Chan's films as addressing
"issues that find only a marginal voice in the mainstream
media of HK and the US...[creating a new type of] a transnational,
transcultural discourse."*
To Liv(e)
-- Hailed by The Hollywood Reporter as "filled
with the kind of style, performances and ambition one might expect
from a critic turned filmmaker, and for which no apologies need
be made" -- won the Best Actress Award at the Portugal Sintra
Festival, the Special Jury Prize at the Singapore Film Festival,
and the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards at the
Taiwan Golden Horse Film Festival. Evans Chan's To Liv(e):
Screenplay & Essays, a critical bilingual edition
(edited by Tak-wai Wong), was published by the University of
Hong Kong Press in 1996.
Crossings -- praised by the magazine Don Quichotte,
at its North American premiere at the
Montreal Film Festival in September 1994, as "an accomplished
representation of the passage from one culture to another, the
intermingling of races and the foretelling of a real-life story
before its time -- 1997." Video Watchdog called the film
"a unique merging of HK cinema and New York independent
film...a worthy follow-up to Chan's justly celebrated debut."
Chan formed his own production company in 1990, which, other
than producing his own works, has line-produced Peter Greenaway's
The Pillow Book in the former colony.
As a program consultant to New York's Downtown Pace Arts Centre,
Chan has presented Margaret Leng Tan, "diva of the avant-garde"
(The New Yorker), and vocal artist/composer Sola Liu in concerts. Chan's
adaption of The Life & Times of Ng Chung Yin -- a "fascinating
account" (Village Voice) of a Hong Kong radical -- was staged at
the Theatre for the New City in October, 1998. He is the dramaturg of
Sexing Three Millennia, a City Contemporary Dance Company production
presented at the 1998 Hong Kong Asian Arts Festival, which will tour
Singapore and Shanghai.
Chan, also known as a veteran cultural critic, is a former advisor
to the Hong Kong International Film Festival. He has written
for the Indian-based film journal Cinemaya and The Hong Kong
Standard, where he was the staff film critic from 1981 to 1984.
Chan's other publications include Dream Tenants, a collection of
essays and stories, and The Last of The Chinese,*** a collection
of critical essays on dance, cinema and literature.
His new essay "Postmodernism & Hong Kong Cinema"
will be anthologized in China & Postmodernism, a forthcoming
Duke University Press publication. Since1984, Evans Chan has
divided his time between New York and Hong Kong.
Journey to Beijing Website: http://members.aol.com/evanschan/films.html
*http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.198/8.2marchetti
** http://www.hkupress.org/asp/bookinfo.asp?PD_NUM=9627495077
***http://www.chinesebooks.net/bookcard.asp?PubName=4a0418&ID=000-0298928 |