Akademik

(né Chan Goh/Chen Guo)

b. 1959, Guangzhou

Film director

Chan directed his first film, Finale in Blood (Danao guangchang long) in 1991, but it was only with Made in Hong Kong (Xianggang zhizao, 1997), one of the first independent features produced in the territory, that he developed his idiosyncratic style: a form of neo-realism involving the frequent use of non-professional actors and a mixture of popular street culture, lively vulgarity and nostalgia for a vanished world.

Chan was ten years old when his family emigrated from Guangzhou, and his characters are often torn between the multiple strands of their Chinese identity. Made in Hong Kong shows confused, semi-delinquent youths in working-class dwellings once built for immigrants. The Longest Summer (Qunian yanhua tebie duo, 1998) is an expressionist reconstitution of the darker social effects of the 1997 handover. In Little Cheung (Xilu Xiang, 2000), Durian, Durian (Liulian Piao Piao, 2000) and Hollywood, Hong Kong (Xianggang you ge Helihuo, 2001), Chan follows the plight, wanderings and erratic destinies of immigrants from Shenzhen or northern China and their interaction with Hong Kong natives—focusing on the resilience of mainland prostitutes, who work till exhaustion in the red districts of Kowloon only to lead a completely different existence later. Finally, Public Toilet (Renmin gongce, 2002) is an ambitious, baroque, panAsian fresco in which the different characters—in China, Hong Kong, Korea, India and New York—are linked by various narratives having to do with the strange poetry of public toilets and the ecological effects on the planet of human waste.

Huber, Christopher (2003). ‘Curious about Crap: Fruit Chan’s Public Toilet’. Senses of Cinema 24 (Jan./Feb.). Available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com