If you saw it at all, you probably caught Smokey and the Bandit on TV or maybe even in the theatre. When he was 12, Sam Voutas watched the 1977 Burt Reynolds flick projected onto a sheet along with his fellow villagers in a small rural town about two hours outside of Beijing.

“This was in the early ‘90s,” Voutas tells the Straight, Skyping from the U.K. while his film King of Peking screens at the BFI London Film Festival.

“It was the only way people in the countryside could watch movies, because there were no cinemas in the villages. So it was this fascinating time where these travelling projectionists would just literally pack their reels onto their tuk tuks [three-wheeled scooters] and go from place to place. It’s like going back to the traditions of theatre almost, where you’re just a travelling theatre man.”

Getting its Canadian premiere at the Playhouse on Sunday (October 8), Voutas's certified crowdpleaser takes us back to that period, opening with a lovely sequence in which the father-son team of Big Wong and Little Wong—they refer to each other as “Murtaugh and Riggs”, Lethal Weapon-reference-spotters—use walkie-talkies to scrupulously coordinate an outdoor screening of what (bizarrely enough) looks like Jack Starrett’s 1970 Hells Angels in Cambodia flick, The Losers. Big Wong runs the projector, Little Wong syncs the sound from a ghetto blaster. Bemused villagers haul up on stools to watch and bake popcorn over open fires.

Voutas can't explain the provenance of these unlikely prints of American films making their way around the Chinese countryside when he was a kid, pondering that they might have leaked in via Russia. Joining him on the line, Melanie Ansley says that city-dwellers like herself ended up, funnily enough, with less exposure to such lowbrow (ie. fun) international product.

“Sam might have had better access and better variety to these kinds of movies,” she says. “The cinemas in Shanghai, there weren’t many western films. Rambo was a big one. And then Polish soaps on TV, because Communist China didn’t really allow much on TV. That was my cinematic upbringing.”

As director and producer, respectively, Voutas and Ansley make a unique team, to say the least. He’s an Australian mostly raised in China. She’s Chinese-Canadian, having split her her time as a child between B.C. and her mother’s homeland before eventually returning to Vancouver to attend UBC. It’s striking that this almost folkloric slice of esoteric recent Chinese history would come from such an international team. They are also, as it happens, partners in real life. (Ansley refers to their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter as “our other production.”)

Voutas’s first-hand memories of the travelling projectionists aside, the real charm and universality of King of Peking hangs on its human story. Big Wong (the endearingly unkempt Zhao Jun) is facing a losing custody battle over Little Wong (Wang Naixun), who’s hustle is even better than dad’s. Hoping to raise enough money to keep mom’s lawyers satisfied, Big Wong turns to the more lucrative business of DVD piracy. Their success at this enterprise—depicted by Voutas with loving attention to their homemade marketing efforts—also puts an impossible strain on the father-son relationship.

Rather splendidly, the piracy angle is also drawn from the filmmakers' real lives. Their 2010 feature Red Light Revolution received the deluxe bootleg treatment. Voutas and Ansley choose, nonetheless, to extend some very obvious affection toward this lowliest end of the black market.

“They put in so much professional work,” Ansley says with a warm laugh. “It was great! They made little posters for our last film so that when you opened up the DVD sleeve you had a poster you could put on your wall if you wanted to.”

“For me,” says Voutas, “it was just interesting to see that there was this underground of people who were obviously very creative. Whether they were good at their creativity was another matter, but they really believed in the movie, because they spent a lot of time marketing it, writing nice taglines, doing a poster. That’s a lot of work, to put a poster in a DVD case!”

We can only hope King of Peking receives comparable legitimate assistance when it eventually arrives on one of China’s various streaming platforms. The irony isn’t lost on the team that a movie so rousing in its “celebration of cinema” will most likely find the majority of its audience online (another reason to catch it now, VIFFers). But, as Ansley remarks: “At least it won’t be pirated.”