Club Evening Event Documentary Screening: “Raise the Umbrellas”

Raise the Umbrellas explores the origin and impact of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement through the inter-generational lenses of three post-Tiananmen democratic activists – Martin Lee, founder of the Hong Kong Democratic party; Benny Tai, Occupy Central initiator; and Joshua Wong, the student leader  – along with voices from “umbrella mothers,” student occupiers (Yvonne Leung and Vivian Yip), star politicians (Emily Lau and “Long Hair” Leung Kwok Hung), prominent media professionals (Jimmy Lai, Ching Cheong), international scholars (Andrew Nathan, Arif Dirlik and Hung Ho-fung), and activist Canto-pop icons Denise Ho and Anthony Wong. Comprehensive and intimate, driven by stirring on-site footage in a major Asian metropolis riven by protest, Umbrellas reveals the Movement’s eco-awareness, gay activism, and burgeoning localism. Various anti-Occupy views, underscored by an interview with the pro-Beijing heavyweight Jasper Tsang, lays bare the sheer political risk for post-colonial Hong Kong’s universal-suffragist striving to define its autonomy within China. The film is 117 minutes in length, in Chinese and English, with English and Chinese subtitles.

Evans Yiu Shing Chan is a critic, playwright, librettist and an independent filmmaker. Chan’s four narrative features and eight documentaries include The Map of Sex and Love (2001), Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), and Journey to Beijing (1999).  His docu-drama, Datong: The Great Society, received the 2011 Chinese-language Movie of the Year Award, presented by the maverick Southern Metropolitan Daily in China. He subsequently adapted his film into an acclaimed libretto for the opera, Datong: The Great Society, which will open in London in July, 2017. A critical anthology about his work, Postcolonalism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan was published by the Hong Kong University Press in 2015.  Evans Chan lives between Hong Kong and New York.