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.
Swimanög 