LOST YEARS

The new epic CBC documentary film Lost Years, featuring Larry Kwong, will receive its world theatrical premiere at the Vernon Towne Cinema on Wednesday, Sept. 21.

There will be two screenings – 5:45 and 8 p.m. Tickets are $7, with all profits going to the new Okanagan Sports Hall of Fame and the Vernon & District Heritage Fair.

Ticket outlets, starting Sept. 7, will be the museum, Towne Theatre and the Bean Scene.

“Larry will be in attendance and hopefully we can have a Q&A and autograph session after the film,” said Soon. “Larry’s story is 11 minutes.”

The film chronicles the struggle for justice by Chinese Canadians, based on 12 years of research by co-producers Kenda Gee and Tom Radford.

Kwong, who was born on June 17, 1923, in Vernon, was the first Chinese Canadian to play in the NHL. He was also the first NHL player from Vernon and the Okanagan region.

LOST YEARS is an epic documentary touching on the largest exodus in humankind, covering over 150 years of history of the Chinese in Canada and abroad.

An epoch that delivers an important message, namely, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (Spanish philosopher, George Santayana (1863-1952), in Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason.)

We witness how man's inhumanity to man continually plays out in world history and affairs, in part through the advances of new media and the vastness of our global village.

Our journey begins in old China in 1910 and concludes with the movement to embrace redress as a concept of social justice in the modern world of Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, exactly one century later.