On this 4th anniversary of Umbrella Revolution in HK, I will be frank as I had not planned to revisit/watch any Umbrella Revolution video footage including my own documentary because I had watched my documentary and the footage in it probably hundreds of time during edit. But 4 years later, while I of course remember and appreciate the major players’ roles and efforts, the unnamed strangers who helped out by sweeping water on the the street are what affected me and what I want to remember the most.
Long Hair (Leung Kwok-hung 梁國雄) was forced into the biggest fight of his political life with the recent unjust retroactive court ruling that robbed his Legislative Council seat. As I was digitizing the 25 hours of miniDV tapes I filmed to make Long Hair Revolution, I decided to turn some clips into deleted and extended scenes and used them as calls for help for Long Hair. #Donate #LHRDeletedExtendedScenes I stole the following words from a friend, I hope she doesn’t mind.
//Long Hair needs money for the battle ahead. The HKSAR and CCP government will do everything possible to bankrupt him, jail him, and destroy his movement for democracy in Hong Kong. They are threatening to dun him for 9 months of back wages, and have saddled him with millions of dollars in court costs. I’m reaching out to all of my friends, in and out of Hong Kong, to ask for your help. Please, please donate to keep his work and our dream alive. Here is an easy link. https://www.lsd.org.hk/donate/?lang=en
The donations are done with PayPal or credit card, and can be recurring or one-time-only. (For those of you unfamiliar with HK dollar amounts, 200 HKD is about 25 USD.)
Many many thanks! You are backing a noble man and a worthy cause. And if you’d like to know more about our Hong Kong situation, please reach out with questions and I’ll be happy to answer.//
This is NOT my documentary but I really enjoyed the newly released Guardian documentary “The Infamous Chalk Girl” by San San F Young (web, @ssfyoung) (Producer, Camera, Director) so I want to share it here. Have a watch!
P.S. My favourite scene is at the 20:45 mark and I left this comment: “This is a very touching scene to me. Chalk girl was asked what would she draw now?“
Before I quote an excerpt and link to the wonderful speech, here is an amazing story of Princeton 2017 Valedictorian Ms. Jin Yun Chow from Hong Kong. [HT Daisann]
//“One day we were discussing the Old Irish word for mead (a drink made from fermented honey), which is ‘mid,’” she said. A classmate who is Australian and speaks Cantonese pointed out that “mid” was related to the Tocharian word — spoken in very old northwestern China — for honey, “mit.” Chow noted that in Cantonese, which preserves the oldest pronunciations of Chinese, the usual transliteration of the word for honey is “mat.”
“That one word’s journey — from Proto-Indo-European to the geographically distant languages Old Irish and Tocharian and from there into northwestern China and then Cantonese, which is spoken in southeastern China — was just so cool,” Chow said. “It confirmed that there are moments in esoteric academic study that aren’t so ‘ivory-tower-esque.’ If you’re open-minded enough you can make all these connections with everything else in your life experience.”//
“I would like to start by telling you a story about the most memorable moment I had with one of my own unsung heroes: Margaret Campbell at the Firestone café. A few weeks ago, I was waiting in line for coffee when I saw that she was holding a Kindle ebook. […] [K’s note: I LOVE this story but I don’t want to copy the whole thing here.] I walked away that afternoon with a tingling feeling in my stomach. I marveled at how easy it would have been to have walked away after getting my coffee, not stopping to chat and never learning about her amazing literary endeavors. I wondered how many interesting people I didn’t get to befriend over my four years here because I never gave them a chance to talk and never gave myself the chance to listen. […]
So what I want to say to you today, my friends, is this: slow down. Slow down and take the time to recognize your unsung heroes. […] adulthood will urge us to run faster, climb higher, become more successful; it will entice us to swim upstream through the river that is life itself, and it will tempt us to devote every free minute to advancing ourselves and our ambitions. I challenge us to be the salmon that swims downstream, taking the time to get to know and appreciate the people who surround us as we glide through the water. […]
One of my dearest friends put it best when he said that I am not generous enough with what he calls unscripted time. It is amorphous time that falls outside of the structural rigor of meetings, classes, meals and other obligations; it is unscheduled time that allows for organic, spontaneous and unscripted interactions. This is the time when instances of extraordinary candor crop up naturally, when episodes of exquisite tenderness surface unexpectedly, when heartfelt sincerity slips out spontaneously.“
Comments Off on 2017 Princeton Valedictory Address “Our Unsung Heroes” by Ms. Jin Yun Chow | Hong Kong, insightful, Video | Permalink Posted by kempton
Director/producer/independent reporter Kempton Lam has made three full-length documentaries from 2004 – 2015. Kempton’s debut documentary Long Hair Revolution 「長毛革命」 has been collected by the Canadian National Archive since 2009. The three documentaries are collectively known as “Revolution Trilogy” 「革命三部曲」 and are in Cantonese with English subtitles (廣東話、英文字幕). You can watch the three films at this YouTube Playlist (beautifully projected on your big screen HDTV or on your computer). Enjoy!
Watch my new documentary HKtv Revolution 香港電視革命 (with English & Chinese subtitles) in this stranger than fiction time. Love to hear your feedback. (note: you can use Chromecast or Apple TV to watch this on your HDTV)
在這個比小說更離奇更荒謬的世代，請讓我分享紀錄片「香港電視革命」(中英文字幕)。請留言，寫下您寶貴的意見。(注意：您可以使用Chromecast或Apple TV 放上您的高清電視觀看)
1) Watch HKtv Revolution 香港電視革命 in a “stranger than fiction” time
As our real world is often stranger than fiction, you are invited to watch HKtv Revolution 香港電視革命 to witness and reflect what HongKongers had gone through in the last few years in fighting with the CY Leung Hong Kong SAR government for their simple “rights” to watch some good TV shows.
Why March 2016 is especially “stranger than fiction”? When HKTV’s license application was first rejected in 2013, as you will learn in the start of the film, the CY Leung government claimed it worried about “cut throat competition” might lead to lower programming quality. Well, after watching the slow sinking of ATV (the one of only two free-to-air TV broadcasters in HK) in 2015/2016, we now have positive proof how ridiculous that “cut throat competition” claim was!
In recent months, ATV had trouble paying salaries of its hundreds of employees, still own many employees millions in wages, hadn’t been paying its broadcast license fees to the government for months, and couldn’t even pay the service/maintenance fees for its elevators (so ATV employees had to walk up the stairs to work), etc. And ATV’s liquidator accounting firm Deloitte finally announced on Thursday (March 3rd) evening that it will dismiss almost all ATV employees!
And after Deloitte’s announcement, ATV investor came out to flaunt a case of ‘cash’ at press conference in last-ditch attempt to save ATV (see news #2 below). The cash flaunting event later became even more of a farce as news media spotted (news #5 and #7 below) that the stacks of HK$ 1,000 bank notes were propped up by empty boxes and HK$ 100 notes to give an appearance of a fuller box of HK$ 1,000 bills!
As ATV shuts its broadcasting down in the coming days, after close to 59 years of continuous operation, I hope you will enjoy and gain some insight watching HKtv Revolution 香港電視革命 in our turbulent and “stranger than fiction” time.
Please (pretty please) rate & review the film at IMDb, it is easy and it helps spread the words of the film.
I hope you enjoy the film (on your big screen HDTV or your computer) as much as I in making it. Feel free to post any questions you may have re HKtv Revolution 香港電視革命. And I definitely appreciate your time in leaving me any words of encouragement.
My best,
Kempton
Director of “Revolution Trilogy” (革命三部曲)
2005 Long Hair Revolution 長毛革命 (watch online)
2015 HKtv Revolution 香港電視革命 (watch online)
2015 Umbrella Revolution: History as Mirror Reflection 雨傘革命實錄：以史為鏡
Fairly or unfairly, I am setting the 45+ years old Spotlight team as benchmark for FactWire News Agency 傳真社, a brand new (not yet in operation) Hong Kong based crowdfunded investigative news agency. FactWire just announced it has finished its hiringprocess yesterday.
In life, I try to benchmark against some of the best examples (as far as I know) around the world as aiming high and falling short is better than aiming low and exceeding the target. Mr. Ng Hiu-tung 吳曉東, CEO of FactWire, is well aware of the expectations people/funders have on him so I don’t think I am adding any extra pressure here. I hope FactWire will bring us insightful, comprehensive, and fully linked/referenced (with original source documents (watch this Q&A)) investigative reports in the coming months and years. I also hope FactWire can work out its business model so it can become a financially sustainable business.
Disclosure: Like many people who helped with FactWire’s crowdfunding project, I made a tiny immaterial contribution as I believe Ai Weiwei‘s saying of “A small act is worth a million thoughts“.
Here are some very insightful video clips. Starting with this Globe produced clip entitled The Boston Globe Spotlight Team (~12 mins)
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