Evans Chan Yiu-shing's latest film, Datong - The Great Society, revolves around one of the most complicated and divisive figures in contemporary Chinese history.
Kang Youwei was at once the advocate of the so-called Hundred Days' Reform during the latter stages of the Qing dynasty in 1898, and a supporter of the putsch seeking to change republican China back into a Manchu monarchy in 1917. He was a polygamist acknowledged for his views on women's emancipation and for ending traditional views of the family. He wrote a tract propounding a proto-communist utopia - a book that would later serve as a theoretical basis for Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward - while he continued living the high life of an aristocrat, staying at the Waldorf in New York and owning an island in Sweden.
Complicating matters is that Chan's film is released just as China celebrates the centennial of the Xinhai revolution, an event now seen widely as the crucial step leading the country out of its feudal past and beginning its ascent to modernity.
Kang, however, was steadfastly against revolutions: he championed retaining the royal court as part of a constitutional monarchy, even after the failure of his reforms in 1898 led to him being hounded by Qing-sponsored assassins as he travelled around the world raising funds for his Baohuanghui ('Protect the Emperor Society') project.
Chan's reflections on the merits of Kang's anti-revolution stance certainly runs against the mainstream fanfare marking the valour and value of the 20th-century revolutionary spirit in China. 'Politics is always looking for winners and losers,' says the director as he sips his beer at a caf? at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. 'But with history, you can be more nuanced and look at the options available, and reassess whether the ideas are still useful and applicable. That's why I'm trying to rehabilitate him - not totally, but at least partially - because for us today it's easy to say it's wonderful how the revolutions happened and how they got rid of the monarchy, but did we get a perfect society from that?'
Chan says his depiction of Kang's flaws is an attempt to bring the late statesman's very human mix of conflicting personality traits to the surface. 'It doesn't mean you iron out all the contradictions and make him more likeable - how real would that person be if I were to do that?' he says.
Moving beyond the remit of a biopic, Datong is Chan's assessment of the relevance of Kang's ideas in China today. 'Do we still have a utopia within ourselves and our culture? All this talk about socialism is getting less and less convincing today. What kind of socialist country is China that you can take seriously today? When all you retain is the rhetoric, it's not the most inspiring way. Don't we have a set of social ideals in this nation?'