About Andrew Savory

The train left Hefei at 2:45 a.m. Destination: Taiyuan. Night turned to day and the grassy settlements that separated the expanse between urban metropolises began to blur as the train rattled across China for 13 hours. I was 25 days into a 3,500-kilometre journey across China’s basketball belt. I had gone inside the Middle Kingdom’s Olympic medal factories, I had walked the dormitory hallways of its professional basketball teams and I had ascended the skyscraper where NBA China sits atop Shanghai. In searching for why China’s failed to produce high-calibre professional basketball players, I realized that I seek to tell stories that explore how until a person or nation is able to confront its past, it will forever be bound by it.

​I strive to use the best medium for enlivening a story. As a documentary filmmaker I’ve traversed into the Ottawa Valley alongside a fur trapper to determine where one of Canada’s oldest trades fits within a modern context of animal rights activism, and I’ve commentated live broadcasts for Carleton University’s women’s basketball team’s run towards its first ever national championship.

I arrived at Carleton after studying English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Carleton’s Master of Journalism program paved the way for stops at The Globe and Mail, the National Post, The Japan News, the Ottawa Citizen and RealSport. At Carleton I received the Centre for Media and Transitional Societies scholarship and my research in China was supported by Carleton’s Kesterton endowment fund.

A map of the 12 cities that I visited in China for my research.