Age: 71
male
Chow Yun-Fat (Chinese: 周潤發, born 18 May 1955), previously known as Donald Chow, is a Hong Kong actor. He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the five Hong Kong action heroic bloodshed films: A Better Tomorrow, A Better Tomorrow II, The Killer, Once a Thief and Hard Boiled, and in the West for his roles as Li Mu-bai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. He mainly plays in drama films and has won three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and two Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor in Taiwan. Chow started his career in movies in 1976 with Goldig Films, the third largest film company at the time.
As Communist forces sweep across mainland China in 1948–1949, the Nationalist government collapses city by city. Soldiers, officials, intellectuals, and civilians are drawn into a vast, improvised retreat toward the southeast coast. Amid chaos, corruption, heroism, and despair, the remnants of an army and a state struggle to hold together as airfields fall, ports overflow, and families are torn apart. What begins as a temporary withdrawal slowly reveals itself as something far more final. The last act unfolds across the Taiwan Strait. Under constant pressure and dwindling hope of return, the refugees arrive on an island not meant to be a capital, carrying with them the symbols, archives, and unresolved claims of a fallen mainland regime. As Taiwan becomes a place of refuge, tension grows between survival and memory, duty and loss. Exodus ends not with victory or surrender, but with an unfinished war—one side defeated, the other displaced, and a future suspended across the sea.
