Canada / France,
2005, 52 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
-
Shui-Bo Wang
- prod
-
Claude Bonin
- cam
-
Sylvestre Guidi
- editor
-
Ragnar Van Leyden
- mus
-
Peter Chase
- source
-
National Film Board of Canada, 1123 Broadway Suite 307, New York, NY 10010. FAX: 212-629-8502. EMAIL: j.sirabella@nfb.ca.
- gga award
-
Golden Gate Award—Television Documentary Long Form
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Shui-Bo Wang in attendance.
OTHER
Shui-Bo Wang was a teenager in Eastern China when he saw his first Westerner, a man riding a green bicycle. “He could have been from outer space,” he says, so cut off was China from the rest of the world during the cold war. The man was James Veneris, a former American POW who, at the close of the Korean War, chose China for a home, one of 22 POWs, including one Briton, to do so. But if he seemed alien to Wang, Veneris came to be right at home in China, married, working in a factory and speaking New York-inflected Chinese. Wang’s documentary illuminates on many levels as it explores the fates of three such expatriates, only one of whom, David Hawkins, is still living and returns to China with the filmmaker. At the time, the “turncoats” (a word Mike Wallace emphasizes repeatedly in archival sequences) were thought to have been brainwashed, Manchurian Candidate-style. Wang unearths rare and fascinating footage that reveals a different story of individuals who, out of loathing for McCarthy’s America, chose a people they viewed as peace loving and who repaid their admiration until the tide turned with the Cultural Revolution.
FACTOID #33
French New Wave actress Jeanne Moreau’s 1974 Festival tribute, called “a veritable orgy” for her fans by the Examiner’s Stanley Eichelbaum, included screenings of four films (The Lovers, Jules and Jim, Bay of Angels and Diary of a Chambermaid), an onstage interview with Moreau and an additional two hours of clips. Running nine to 11 hours (depending on the source), the tribute was the longest recorded at the Festival.
