Chan Tze-woon, born in 1989, is a Hong Kong independent documentary filmmaker whose subjects are mostly the city's social movements and historical memory. He studied film and television production at Hong Kong Baptist University. His 2013 graduation work was a mockumentary imagining the government sedating the public through the water supply to probe political apathy and deference to authority, and a 2014 short imagined official cloud-seeding to affect a march, shot around that year's referendum and July 1 march. Soon after graduating he followed participants through the 79-day Umbrella Movement, recording the occupation as it unfolded. His first feature, Yellowing (2016), took the movement as its subject and, narrated in the first person, portrayed participants' experiences and reflections; it was nominated for best documentary at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards and won the top Ogawa Shinsuke Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan. He began developing Blue Island in 2017 and completed it in 2022; mixing documentary and fiction and interviewing protesters of different generations about identity and memory, it was selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam and won the Special Jury Prize in the Asian Vision competition, the Visionary Award Grand Prize and the Audience Award at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and the best international feature documentary award at Hot Docs in Canada, as well as Golden Horse and Asia Pacific Screen Award nominations. He continues to work independently, his subjects bound closely to Hong Kong's social change.
Through Yellowing and Blue Island, Chan carried Hong Kong's social movements and historical memory onto the international documentary stage; the two films won the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize at Yamagata and the Visionary Award Grand Prize in Taiwan, and both were nominated for the Golden Horse best documentary, circulating the stories of a young generation across Asian, European and North American festivals.
Achievements
- 2013 · Completed his graduation work, a mockumentary on political apathy
- 2016 · Yellowing won the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize at Yamagata and a Golden Horse nomination
- 2022 · Blue Island won the Visionary Award Grand Prize and the Hot Docs best international documentary award