exclusive program : Produced by PETER YAM
Blue Island
(Chan Tze-woon / 2022 / 97 min / Hong Kong)
These are all stories of youth. A young man preferred to risk swimming across the raging sea towards a safe haven in order to avoid being caught up in the Cultural Revolution on the mainland. Another young man resisting colonialism was imprisoned for printing patriotic periodicals during the riots, and was long forgotten by the country after his release. A third youth went to Beijing to support students’ demands for freedom, only to see their dreams and bodies crushed under the treads of tanks.
The beliefs and ideals held by each generation are eventually submerged by the deluge of history. How do these generations recall, confront, and narrate their irreversible fates?
- 2021 Visions du Réel : Lightdox Award
- 2022 International Film Festival Rotterdam
- 2022 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival: Best International Feature Documentary Award
- 2022 CAAMFest: Documentary Competition award
- 2022 Taiwan International Documentary Festival: Grand Prize / Special Jury Prize / Audience Award
- 2022 BFI London Film Festival
- 2022 Busan International Film Festival
- 2022 Zurich Film Festival
- 2023 Göteborg Film Festival
CHAN Tze-woon
Writer and director CHAN Tze-woon (1987) pursued a Film Production Master of Fine Arts at Baptist University, Hong Kong after obtaining a degree in Policy Studies. His first two works, The Aqueous Truth (2013) and Being Rain: Representation and Will (2014), play with a conspiring plot and mockumentary form in portraying Hong Kong’s political climate. Chan explored Hong Kong’s fraught relationship with mainland China in his documentary Yellowing (2016). The film won the Ogawa Shinsuke Award at Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, was nominated for Best Documentary at Taipei Golden Horse Film Awards, and was a qualifier for Best Documentary Feature for Academy Awards. Blue Island (2022), explores the socio-political upheaval during and after the protests in Hong Kong in 2019.
