Evans Chan

Overview

Evans Chan (陳耀成) is a Hong Kong-born, New York-based filmmaker, critic, playwright and librettist whose documentary-fiction hybrids examine Hong Kong’s handover, the Chinese diaspora and postcolonial history through individual perspectives (Jump Cut). What no consolidated reference tells — but his own career record shows — is how unusual his position behind the camera is: in 1991 he founded Riverdrive Productions with the backing of Willy Tsao, artistic director of the Beijing Modern Dance Company, and the company went on to line-produce Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1997), giving Chan a producer’s foothold in international art cinema alongside his independent directing (Videotage VMAC). He is also a librettist: he adapted his 2011 documentary Datong: The Great Society into the opera Datong: The Chinese Utopia, premiered at the 2015 Hong Kong Arts Festival and later staged in London in 2017 (Lingnan University).

Early life and education

Chan was born in Guangdong and raised in Macao and Hong Kong (Lingnan University). He relocated to the United States in the mid-1980s, earned a Master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in New York, and completed a PhD in Screen Culture at Northwestern University (Lingnan University). His film work is frequently described as “Hong Kong and New York-based,” reflecting a career lived between the two cities (MCLC Resource Center).

The Riverdrive years and the Greenaway connection

In 1991 Chan founded Riverdrive Productions with Tsao’s backing; beyond producing his own films, the company line-produced Greenaway’s The Pillow Book in 1997 (Videotage VMAC). Chan’s narrative features from this period are To Liv(e) (sources date it 1991 or 1992), Crossings (1994 or 1995), The Map of Sex and Love (2001) and Bauhinia (2002) (Videotage VMAC). To Liv(e) takes its premise from Swedish actress Liv Ullman’s 1990 visit to Hong Kong, during which she condemned the deportation of Vietnamese boat people; the film unfolds as letters written to Ullman about post-1989 Tiananmen Square and pre-1997 handover anxieties (IFFR, Jump Cut). Time Out later named it one of the 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films (MCLC Resource Center). Crossings was inspired by an interracial murder in a New York City subway station in the mid-1980s, merging Hong Kong cinema with New York independent film to explore immigrant dislocation and anti-Asian violence (Jump Cut, MCLC Resource Center). His documentaries Journey to Beijing (1998) and Adeus Macau (2000) deal with Hong Kong’s and Macau’s reunification with mainland China (Jump Cut).

Historian of alternative Chinas

The two companion docu-dramas Datong: The Great Society and Chinatopia (both 2011) trace the lives of Kang Youwei, imperial China’s pioneering constitutional reformer and dissident politician, and his suffragist daughter Kang Tongbi, who entered Barnard College in 1907 (MCLC Resource Center). Datong was named Chinese-language Movie of the Year by the maverick Southern Metropolitan Daily in 2011 (MCLC Resource Center). The critic Tony Williams, who edited the 2015 Hong Kong University Press anthology Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan, presents Kang as “an artist/philosopher/intellectual who tried to revive the Confucian utopia as a way of modernizing the imperial monarchy at the turn of the 20th century” (Jump Cut). Chan has also directed documentary portraits of artists, including Sorceress of the New Piano (2004) on Brooklyn-based Singaporean pianist Margaret Leng Tan, “diva of avant-garde pianism” (The New Yorker), and The Rose of the Name: Writing Hong Kong (2014) on writer Dung Kai-cheung (MCLC Resource Center). His films have screened at Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Moscow, Vancouver, San Francisco, Taiwan Golden Horse and other festivals (MCLC Resource Center).

Playwright, librettist and writer

Chan has written two plays produced Off-Off Broadway in New York: The Naked Earth, based on Eileen Chang’s 1954 novel, presented at the Bank Street Theatre in 2000, and an English-language adaptation (with Mok Chiu Yu) of The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian, staged at New York’s Theatre for the New City in 1998 and later turned into a hybrid documentary film in 2003 (Videotage VMAC, Lingnan University). He has published five books, including The Last of the Chinese, From the New Wave to the Postmodern and To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays (1996, HKUP), and edited and translated two books by Susan Sontag into Chinese editions; a collection of his essays and short stories appeared as Dream Tenant (Videotage VMAC, IFFR). His English-language writings on film, media and society have appeared in Film International, Postmodern Culture and Asian Cinema (Videotage VMAC).

The Umbrella films and the anthem-law edit

Raise the Umbrellas (2016, 117 minutes) is an in-depth documentary of the 2014 79-day Umbrella Movement, traced through the intergenerational lenses of activists Martin Lee, Benny Tai and Joshua Wong, alongside “umbrella mothers,” student occupiers and other voices (BAMPFA, Lingnan University). We Have Boots (2020, 130 minutes) extends the arc to the 2019 anti-extradition protests, with Chan describing his intent as showing “Hong Kong’s traumatizing journey during the last few years” to spur thought about “the universality of western values, global solidarity, and the meaning of the rise of China” (BAMPFA). The film had its world premiere at IFFR 2020 (IFFR). After Hong Kong passed its national anthem law in June 2020, Chan told AFP he had deleted a scene from the film’s Hong Kong edition — footage of artist Kacey Wong playing “March of the Volunteers” on accordion inside a red metal cage for the performance piece “Patriot” — because distributors’ legal advice warned of prosecution (Bangkok Post/AFP). He told AFP he was unsure whether a film featuring so many of the city’s dissidents would even be screenable in Hong Kong once the national security law passed (Bangkok Post/AFP).

Critical reception

Academic criticism places Chan within Hamid Naficy’s “accented cinema” — a filmmaking mode of exile and diaspora that blends melodrama, minor cinema, documentary and fiction to navigate post-socialism, post-colonialism and diaspora — and credits him with demanding “critical border thinking” beyond traditional film-studies categories (Jump Cut). In a comprehensive interview with the anthology’s editor, Chan named Jean-Luc Godard and Susan Sontag among the filmmakers and intellectuals who influenced him, and noted his frequent collaborations with actress Lindzay Chan (Jump Cut). “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,” wrote the late critic Tony Rayns (MCLC Resource Center).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not fix the disputed release years of To Liv(e), Crossings and Journey to Beijing (sources disagree; see openItems), does not assert a total film count, and does not claim a birth year — the “born 1961” figure appears only in a publisher preview not read in full here. It also makes no claim about the current availability or distribution status of any film. Internal links were deliberately omitted: no existing FactsLedger profile covers a directly related entity (Peter Greenaway, Susan Sontag, Liv Ullmann, Willy Tsao, Lindzay Chan, or Hong Kong itself), and linking to unrelated same-name entities would be a false relationship.