As 1979 progressed, I kept producing my ten minutes long film every Monday, while RTHK’s new deputy director, Stuart W., was planning a new programme he wanted us all eventually to make for him at RTHK, a one hour weekly magazine, Here and Now, which would go to air in September.
One week I was led by a news report involving my recent past down to some warehouses on the western wharves, the godowns as they’re called, where boatloads of Vietnamese war refugees from South Vietnam arrived one after another. The arrivals were housed in pretty dire circumstances, and you smelt the distress immediately you walked onto the wharf.
Boats would come into harbour by themselves or be towed or ushered there by British patrol boats, where they would tie up to begin the process overseen by representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) who would deal case by case of their plight as being “refugees” from post-war-torn South Vietnam, each hoping the UNHCR office in Hong Kong would resettle them in a third country.
Getting from where they were into Hong Kong was hard, waiting for resettlement often harder. When boats arrived in the British Colony few local people were understanding. Many Hong Kongers thought most of these boats did not come across the South China Sea from Vietnam, but were refugee-scammers who after entering China by land then somehow found a boat to get across the water from China to Hong Kong. Some in Hong Kong thought some arrivals might even be Chinese mainlanders who wanted to get into Hong Kong posing by posing as Vietnamese.
Deep background to this is the 99 year 1898 signed ‘unequal’ treaty signed between Britain and Qing China, leasing mainland Chinese territory to the British, who had already acquired the island of Hong Kong ‘in perpetuity’ from the Qing empire in 1842 after the Chinese lost the First Opium War. Britain said it needed a land ring of protection for the island, so leased some of southern China’s land to the north of Hong Kong Island.
The treaty lasting 99 years was an insult mainland Chinese would never forget. Forced on China in an age of extreme duress when China was a weakened nation facing internal troubles and watching foreigners set up ‘concessions’ on Chinese soil.
China wanted to end the occupation of Hong Kong in 1997 an expiry date that for them was non-negotiable
While out hunting in west Texas Llewelyn Moss finds the drug deal gone wrong, then discovers the “last man standing” dead with the brief case under a tree. Llewelyn removes the trace, buries it at the feet of the man and goes home to tell his wife it’s time for a new life in a new state, where they go and live a wonderful life happily ever after.
The Fugitive
Doctor Richard Kimble is charged with murder by a DA who didn’t do his homework. Kimble’s defence counsel proves to the court (and the jury) that Kimble didn’t it and had no motive to kill his wife. Case is dismissed, leaving the police to DNA trace the one-armed man, which they do, who leads them to Dr Nicholls. They both go to jail for life
The Godfather
Michael Corleone at the marriage reception of his sister decides life as a mafioso is not for him. His father at a loss out buying oranges is shot and dies in hospital, apparently by suffocation. Sad but resolute Michael marries his girlfriend joins the Democrats, goes into politics and is elected to Congress. The Corleones divide their father’s fortune between family members and decide on a side by side middleclass Condo existence down in Florida.
Novelistsdon’t write alone. The unconscious does the heavy lifting. While conscious, many writers can be like stenographers with a flair for editing.
What we say about ourselves consciously in any life writing or self histories has always to be viewed sceptically. An insight that seemed to me profound hearing it many, many years ago: it’s not what we put in diaries that counts. It’s what we leave out.
Does the unsaid in life writing count for more than the said? Some people are remarkably honest about themselves, but would I consciously leave out things in any life writing? Yes.
Autobiography is too self-aggrandizing. Fiction is more fun to do. Fiction frees up writers to find and tell truths he/she wouldn’t admit to when writing about themselves.
January 1979, while Safa, my best boss ever, and Noushi were packing to leave Hong Kong, I was busy writing letters to find new work. I had received one offer from NBC’s American office manager in their Hong Kong office. He had seen my work. NBC meant to me prestige, but assembling footage shot by someone else seemed a backward step.
I received a reply to my letter to Radio Television Hong Kong and went out to meet Stuart W., a former UK Nationwide daily editor. He heard me out and liked my experience. I got the job and became the director/producer of a Monday night ten minute aired film for a program called, Here in Hong Kong.
I was over the moon. After meeting an affable freedom-giving executive producer, Chris H., I felt at home. The choice of a film each week was mine, well mostly.
I soon found subjects, some better than others. Most of my early films were reasonable, some quite good. One on an opaque (at least to me) Chinese festival was absolutely awful. Making a ten-minute film every week was a treadmill but I learnt very fast, that as researcher, writer, director and producer of my own program I had little room for error. Choice of subject was crucial. Monday and Tuesday initially I would be setting up a film, Wednesday, Thursday I was out filming and if I were lucky Friday after film stock processing I would begin editing the film. Most Saturdays I was editing, often Sunday, me in a tiny cubicle with a film editor, then Monday morning, I would take the film for telecine transfer for the Monday night program at 6.45pm. It was never easy.
To put this in an international television producing perspective, BBC’s Newsnight, Panorama or even Nationwide would assign a researcher and a producer to a subject for three months. Late in the process a director and reporter would come on board. Meanwhile, I did everything alone all inside a week. BBC’s programs were longer, maybe a full hour, which I later did as well, but I never had a luxury of three months – maximum, three weeks.
Ten minutes a week when you are everybody – producer, writer, director, reporter, interviewer can be very hard. Of course, the key is to find a subject in a single location and do it all in one day. I wasn’t so good at that. And I wasn’t a trained reporter. I made films and to do that for me who prized the visuals above all else it meant multiple locations.
Occasionally though I had no say in what I was doing. One such project involved Chinese refugees pouring across the border. The Hong Kong Government wanted to tell the world what was happening. Stuart wrote the text to my film. I was sent with my film crew to meet a Colonel at a British army barracks near the Chinese border. During the afternoon we filmed general parade ground organisation, then after dinner with the Gurkha soldiers under command of a very affable Colonel of the regiment, we drove out to the border.
My crew and I had to document this all at night – if we found any refugees climbing the wire fence into Hong Kong New Territories, the land that adjoined China. We had one go at this. We sat nervously in the pitch-black night in a gully yards from the fence, where the soldiers said was a major crossing point, watching the motionless Gurkha with his nightscope. Except for the Colonel snoring, we had heard nothing. He was woken when a spotter began raising finger after finger. A few seconds afterwards we were told to get going!
My film crew was brilliant, camera shots sharp as portable lights lit up the night. We filmed of a terrified group of young Chinese, sixteen to mid-twenties, in traditional dark-blue Mao era outfits after having just climbed the wire.
The images of their startled faces that night are etched into my brain. One or two apparently held the fence to an iron pole as the others climbed silently up and down. The fence was at least twenty feet high. Stuart W. wrote the piece and Visnews sent the night’s film of ‘the capture’ around the world.
In the summer of 1978 I went to Tungshing and Pingshang on the border between China and Vietnam. I was the cine-cameraman for an Iranian husband and wife team for whom I was working in my first real job, running a state of the art film studio based in Hong Kong. I shot with an Eclair ACL using 16mm film stock, edited the film on a six plate Steenbeck and mixed sound on three Sondor recorders from the original sound my boss’s wife, Noushi, recorded on a Nagra reel to reel recorder. In August 1977 I had been given the chance to work in what seems today to be a far simpler media world. The Shah of Iran was still alive and Safa Haeri, a journalist, whose upbringing in France included schooling, was running one of the Shah’s network of world wide news bureaus. NIRT’s office in Hong Kong was the second smallest of these bureaus, yet became the second highest in terms of output.
In late February 1977 I had begun my film school studies at Curtin University, working under the tutoring of a theatre and then-aspiring film director, Steve Jodrell. I had just finished a three year English Literature degree at the University of Western Australia, a double major in literature Americans call it. I went straight on to a second degree, film. This is when my first career began. In my first year I concentrated on film and video production only, no academic subjects, doing only first and second year units in practical and video making. Five months later in August, I received a call saying there was a job going based in Hong Kong making films if I wanted it. I had a two days to decide.
I had just finished a twenty minute film “Lounge Bar” which I wrote, directed and produced. I was liking what I was doing enormously. 1977 was a good time to be in film in Australia. I was learning so much every day, getting to grips with the practical business of being a filmmaker. Yet this surreal offer to suddenly go to Hong Kong loomed large in my mind. What to do?
I went. I left the course, first landing in Kuala Lumpur to meet my new boss and his wife, Noushi. We flew to Thailand then drove to a point on the eastern Thai seaboard.
I became a documentary filmmaker on that day. We arrived just before a boatload of Vietnamese refugees motored in from the South China Sea, coming into the Gulf of Thailand to land at a place on the coast south east of Bangkok. On a very hot summer’s afternoon, raucous cheering and shouting all around me from other Vietnamese on other boats who had done the same thing, sweat running all over me, I clambered over beached and moored boats trying hard not to mess up my recording of the event. It was terrifying, my first real job at doing this kind of work and in the middle of hottest part of a Thai summer. With so much sweat in my eyes, I had trouble seeing what was I filming let alone focusing. Yet somehow I got it okay.
Flying to Hong Kong it was high summer typhoon season, and after processing the stock and preparing the footage for sending to Teheran for broadcast, I settled into adjusting to a completely new culture, city and lifestyle. I had never seen so many people in any street in my life as I did in Hong Kong that summer. The production money for the year had gone, so I sat around a little nervously wanting to make films, doing the occasional short Hong Kong film with Noushi.
I learned I had won the Young Filmmaker of the Year Award for 1977 at Curtin University and it gave me something to mull over, especially as I was so inactive in my new position. But with the new year and a renewed budget we began travelling again to make more films, going first into pre-modernised China, then to the Philippines, Japan, Bangladesh. In August 1978 we were invited to the Sino Vietnamese border to record a refugee impasse.
Chinese authorities took us to Tungshing and in the rain I filmed Vietnamese of Chinese origin forced out by the Vietnamese authorities. As refugees now these people stood in the rain plastic sheets over them waiting to be processed for entry into China. From Tungshing we went to Pingshang where more Vietnamese of Chinese origin were being processed by other mainland Chinese authorities. We filmed the interrogation of a man the Chinese said was a Vietnamese spy they had captured. We were the only film crew allowed in.
After the trip and the film was processed and cut in Hong Kong and sent to Teheran, I was asked by the South China Morning Post to write up what I saw. I had never been a newspaper reporter. I had no experience of writing a full page feature article. Write what you saw I was told. I did.
The following is my article and except for the cutting by a sub editor of my speculative conclusion at the end this is what I wrote, word for word, no changes, with my conclusion only removed by the SCMP – why? I’ll come back to that.
{Published 6 August, 1978 – under a title the newspaper chose, I wrote the piece in my birth name. I write now in my mother’s maiden surname of Collins – as Lew Collins.}
What was so difficult about my conclusion that it had to be cut? I speculated. I had asked myself why China was doing this and came to the conclusion they were:
1) helping Chinese in need
2) publishing to the world the harm the Vietnamese were doing
3) claiming the moral high ground in order to take punitive retaliatory action against Vietnam which China saw as a legitimate action to take.
My speculative conclusion (3) was always going to be cut. I should have woven it into my article, but even if I had, it would have been cut. Writing that China intended to punish Vietnam for its actions sometime in the future was a bridge too far in journalism, certainly at my level back then. Though I was right. In January 1979, Deng Tsiao Ping (Deng Xiaoping) ordered an invasion of Vietnam, saying it was to punish Vietnam for their actions.
My role in the National Iranian Radio and Television office ended abruptly. In December 1978 I was told by Safa events in Iran meant closure of all the NIRT offices around the world were imminent. The Iranian Revolution under Khomeini swept the Shah from power. January 1979 Safa and Noushi returned to Teheran. From there they went to live in Paris.
Oliver Stone’s film Alexander shows the power of war as a means to extend power. With JFK, Stone followed and unravelled at least part of the story of how Jack Kennedy – who began a process of rolling back war as the means for the extending and using power exporting America’s cultural power peacefully – was brutally cut down in his prime.
“Let us fight to free the world to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all people’s happiness.”
“The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people… liberty will never perish.”
From the moment in Annie Hall when he led Marshall McLuhan out from behind a film hoarding in a New York cinema I have been a huge fan of Woody Allen. He is America’s best writer director of ensemble urban comedies – truly a unique filmmaker.
Swimanög 