Farewell Guangdong (90 minute feature documentary)

Farewell Guangdong is an intergenerational celebration of mana wāhine – women from our Chinese New Zealand community. These are stories of love, humility and sacrifice.
Based on Lily Lee's publication Farewell Guangdong, we use dramatic re-enactments, interviews, and historical archive material to bring to life first-hand accounts from the wives and children who fled Guangdong, China, during the second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945.
We celebrate their incredible stories through their living descendants, some in their nineties, and meet their remarkable daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters. This film celebrates the diversity of cultural experience by providing a window into our Chinese Community, their whakapapa, the injustices that they experienced and the resilience that they showed in the face of persecution and racism. These are people who have made Aotearoa home but have also been a part of learning about Māori and our bi-cultural treaty arrangement and finding their place in that dynamic.
This film reflects our social, cultural, political and historical landscape. Our buried histories coming to light. This film tells whānau stories about the women that now call Aotearoa home. We are re-cutting our original 7 x 20-minute episode web series (currently broadcasting on RNZ) to make our 90-minute feature documentary, suitable for international distribution.