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Adeus Macau
Evans CHAN
Release year: 2000
Run time: 67 minutes
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Portugal, the first colonial empire venturing into Asia four centuries ago, was also the last to withdraw when China reclaimed its sovereignty over Macau on December 19, 1999. As Adeus Macau (Goodbye Macau) meditates on the resurgence of China and the end of Euro-colonialism in Asia, it also looks at the human faces of Macau at that historic moment: Lam Che Wang, a retired school teacher, reminisces about his rebellion against the colonial government; Antonio Ng Kwok-cheung, the only elected pro-democracy legislator, lashes out at the repressive past under Portugal and the equally uncertain future of Macau self-rule under China; Jane Lei and Chu Iao Ian, members of Comuna de Pedra, Macau's pioneering art collective, ruminate about their lonely struggle with society. Macau, flavorful and romantic, is the adopted home of Harald Bruning, German journalist, and Joao Amorim, regional head of the Orient Foundation, and the unforgettable "spiritual" home of Law Kar, Hong Kong Film Festival programmer, and Lam Bun-ching, renowned New York-based composer. Their recollections and comments, as well as observations made by Lucian Pye, MIT political science professor (who offers measured praise of Portugal), zero in on the issues of nationalism, ideological reunification and the mixed legacies of colonialism. Other interviewees include Leung Kwok Hung, Hong Kong political activist; Zunzi, political cartoonist; and Mok Chiu Yu, an actor-playwright featured in Ann Hui's film, Ordinary Heroes. Their problems with Macau authorities culminated on the night of the Sino-Portuguese Handover as the police cracked down on a Communa Pedra-sponsored street performance. The arrests offer a disturbing glimpse into the future of the "One Country, Two Systems" arrangement.
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.
