WHEN THE SUN RISES
A FILM BY
LOUIS PAPACHRISTOU
DIRECTOR'S BIO
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Writer/director Louis Papachristou completed his first feature film: When The Sun Rises in October 2015.
A period drama set against the backdrop of the Hong Kong Handover, it trails the lives of 5 citizens during a crucial moment in Hong Kong’s history.
In 2013, he made a short, Hotter Than July, and has worked as a location manager on the cutting edge Cantonese action flick, Slow Fade (1999).
Living in Hong Kong since 1995, he spent his early career working in publishing for a number of 4A’s agencies including M&C Saatchi, Mccann Erickson and Ogilvy & Mather winning a 4As award for his viral online campaign for The Economist. He also worked in the TV programming department Time Warner at TNT and Cartoon Network and in the PR department at CNN.
Louis has written for numerous periodicals including TIME, Destinasian HK Tatler, The Economist, Hong Kong Magazine and The Peninsula Magazine and KEE Magazine.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Farewell Ceremony at Tamar, during the Hong Kong Handover on June 30 1997.
As a Brit witnessing the last bastion of British colonialism being handed back to China, the momentous occasion gave me the idea of using this pivotal moment in Hong’s Kong’s history as a backdrop to When The Sun Rises.
A writer who has made Hong Kong his home for over 20 years’, it felt natural to want to tell a story about this great city, its melting pot of cultures and how they would react to political change. The characters are drawn from personal inspiration and come from all walks of life, thrown together in this film to elicit Hong Kong’s cultural diversity, its internationalism, and to show what could happen when cultures clash. I also wanted to tell a story in the context of a real historical moment so that the film would become a ‘Myth of Origin’. Handing Hong Kong back to China has forced its citizens to consider and question their identity and to think about what being a ‘Honky’ as it is affectionately termed, really means, which is even more relevant today. And the film touches upon this point.
When writing the script, it dawned upon me that this story has elements of fairytale and When The Sun Rises is in many ways analogous to Cinderella. So, you have the political backdrop, the human story and the fairytale all rolled into one.
Having always had a keen interest in film as a vehicle for creative and cultural expression as well as a form of entertainment, this was further cemented when working at Turner Broadcasting during the mid-nineties in the TV programming department for TNT and Cartoon Network, which gave me the opportunity to watch and write about countless classic movies from the MGM archives. When The Sun Rises contains elements of documentary, employing historical archive footage of Hong Kong as well as footage of the Handover to elicit how the city has evolved.
-Louis Papachristou