Traces of a Dragon: Jackie Chan & His Lost Family
| Traces of a Dragon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Mabel Cheung |
| Produced by | Jackie Chan Willie Chan Solon So |
| Starring | Jackie Chan |
| Narrated by | Ti Lung |
| Edited by | Maurice Li |
| Music past | Henry Lai Wan-man |
| Distributed by | Fortissimo Films |
| Release appointment | 2003 |
| Running time | 94 min |
| State | Hong Kong |
| Languages | Cantonese Mandarin |
Traces of a Dragon (Chinese: 龍的深處：失落的拼圖; aka Traces of a Dragon: Jackie Chan and his Lost Family) is a 2003 documentary moving-picture show directed by Mabel Cheung. The picture show analyzes the life and background of Jackie Chan.
Overview [edit]
The world knows him as Jackie Chan. His Chinese fans know him by the stage name Sing Lung. The official record gives his birth name as Chan Kong Sang. But two years ago Jackie Chan found out from his father that his 'real' name is Fong Si Lung/Fang Shilong. This revelation came with the uncovering of a previously hidden family history, a chronicle of lives scarred by war, poverty and separation. Jackie Chan was born in Hong Kong on seven Apr 1954. His begetter Chan Chi-Ping worked at the US Consulate. Mr Chan had met his wife-to-be Lily in Mainland china, years earlier, amongst the turmoil of the Japanese invasion and the anarchy of the civil war betwixt Nationalists and Communists.
Chan Chi-Ping (at that time going by his real name Fang Daolong) first became an economic migrant in the 1930s, moving from his native province Shandong to the more than prosperous areas along the Yangtze River. Mr Fang met his beginning wife in Anhui and married her in Wuhu; they had two sons, Shide and Shishen. But his wife fell sick with cancer when their elder son was merely seven. She died in 1947. Mr Fang had already worked in many jobs (apprentice draper, river trader, and strong-arm man for the Nationalists' Intelligence Agency); he fabricated his manner to Shanghai and headed the underworld 'Shandong Gang' until the metropolis fell to the Communists in 1949.
Jackie was an exuberant and well-liked boy who didn't savour schoolhouse merely at the age of seven found his niche in a Peking Opera Academy run by Master Yu. His begetter pledged him to a x-twelvemonth apprenticeship with Principal Yu, learning acrobatic stagecraft and other performing skills. His classmates included his lifetime friends and future collaborators Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao; all three of them were members of the academy's performing troupe, the Seven Footling Fortunes.
Jackie's career did not take off at first, and the endless succession of flake parts and stunt jobs led him to consider emigrating to Australia to rejoin his parents. But Canberra offered only work on construction sites and in kitchens, and in 1976 he responded enthusiastically to the offer of a contract with the newly founded Lo Wei Film Company in Hong Kong, which starred him in a series of low-budget martial arts adventures. He and so became a local superstar in two movies directed past the at present-legendary Yuen Woo-Ping, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, both fabricated in 1978.
Meanwhile, his parents in Australia were taking reward of China's stabilising political situation to gear up about tracing the long-lost children they had been forced to go out behind when they fled to Hong Kong. Lily found her daughters with no great difficulty, and Guilan emigrated to Australia to look after her female parent when she roughshod ill. Chan Chi-Long somewhen traced his 2 sons with the help of the Chinese Ambassador to Australia (a swain native of Shandong), and had a reunion with them in Guangzhou in 1985. Both had suffered victimisation in Mao'southward Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, and both were having difficulty in adjusting to life in the era of Deng Xiaoping's economical reforms. Eventually, in the late 1990s, Chan Chi-Long was able to convene a gathering in Anhui of his extended family. He revised and restored the Fang family register, proudly adding the name of his Hong Kong-born son Jackie: Fang Shilong.
Production notes [edit]
Director Mabel Cheung (Yuen-Ting Cheung) recalled in January 2003:
One twenty-four hours, dorsum in 1999, Jackie Chan heard from his father that he was at last gear up to tell him some family unit secrets – to clarify the mysteries which had been preoccupying Jackie for some time. Jackie was well aware of all the rumours surrounding his origins and background: that he was non in fact the biological child of his parents, that he had elder siblings in Communist china, even that his real surname was not 'Chan'.
He asked Alex Law and me if we would be interested in filming his belated discovery of his real family background. We were of course intrigued, and agreed to fly to Australia with him to encounter his father. I had never made a documentary before, and had no real idea of what to expect. We didn't even take whatsoever clear idea of what nosotros would do with the material we shot. Since Jackie's mother Lily was in declining health, nosotros decided that it would brand (if nothing else) a nice souvenir for the Chan family!
Afterwards talking with his begetter over a few days, though, nosotros found the story to be much more interesting than we'd expected it to be. We heard the story of 1 family and realised that it could stand for the stories of almost every Chinese family defenseless up in the turbulent history of China in the 20th century. Nosotros afterward flew to Anhui Province in China to interview other members of the family unit. We besides interviewed some of the father's friends and colleagues from the 1950s in Hong Kong. It was an enlightening process, almost like witnessing the history of modernistic China and colonial Hong Kong through the optics of these people.
While working on my feature film The Soong Sisters, I watched many documentaries and a lot of archival footage on mod Chinese history. Many of the images were stunning, and they'd lodged in my mind. And so while we were editing the interviews for the documentary we began looking for appropriate historical footage to intercut with the story of Jackie Chan and his lost family.
Traces of the Dragon has ended up equally a combination of the difficult, savage facts of war with intimate, touching glimpses of a family and its joys and sorrows. While we traced the story of Jackie the dragon, we also found ourselves tracing the story of modern Cathay, the land of the dragon..
External links [edit]
- Official website
- Traces of a Dragon at IMDb
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traces_of_a_Dragon
0 Response to "Traces of a Dragon: Jackie Chan & His Lost Family"
Post a Comment