She works hard for a living…

Link to set on Flickr.

SHORT STAYS / 暂停
3 Short Films by / 三个短片
Zhao Ye / Liu Jiayin / Peng Lei
赵晔、刘伽茵、彭磊

a film by Samantha Culp and Nicolas Sauret, currently in post-production

A blend of documentary and fiction, “Many Mansions” explores the mythical structures of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions.

(supported by a Fonds des Artists grant, Alliance Française, HK)

Oh well – still nice to support an actual music shop, and made an additional purchase of some Cui Zi’en (崔子恩) DVDs I haven’t seen around before. A few years ago at HKIFF, Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang described to me his first exposure to Cui’s films as something like this: “I put on the tape, and was watching it until I felt I had to turn it off, but then I couldn’t turn it off… it’s so bad that it’s fascinating, and then it becomes interesting.” Intense paraphrasing going on there, but it sticks in my mind as fairly apt. The weird, self-conscious crappiness in the aesthetic and tone of “Withered in the Blooming Season” is kind of amazing.

The Hedgehog and Ourself Beside Me albums are available for streaming and download below. (Legally! Though the concept of something that is both “digital” and “legal” in China is still confusing to me.) I’m still making my way through them…

Ourself Beside Me “Ourself Beside Me”
(Loving the Rundgren/Barrett-by-way-of-Lisa-Frank cover art; also I’m amazed that they actually did use ‘Ourself Beside Me’ as the official name on it – they had barely decided it while my THEME article on them was going to press)

Hedgehog “Blue Day Dreaming”
(I wish time machines existed just so that Hedgehog could travel back to 1993 to appear on 120 Minutes, and we could now watch it on grainy Youtube VHS capture…)

Profile: Ourself Beside Me, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Theme: Dreamchaser, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Title: “Dreamchaser”
Publication: Theme Magazine
Date: Dec/Jan 2008/2009
Article Link
Full Text Below

Vientiane is a sleepy city on the scale of Southeast Asian capitals, and even quieter in the days following Pi Mai (the Lao New Year).

Still, on this balmy April evening, there are plenty of motorbikes, scooters, and other two-wheel vehicles zooming around the Patuxai Arch and down Avenue Lan Xang. Some carry three generations of one family, others a daredevil load of everything and the kitchen sink (sometimes literally).

Two of the riders purposefully follow a pick-up truck with a cameraman standing in the back; he carefully films their every swerve. Also crammed into the bed are a boom-guy and a petite woman with a walkie-talkie (the producer). They roar their way back to the small house serving as their base camp, where the rest of the team waits with the rest of the gear, going over the next day’s route. They’re all exhausted, but filled with the calm energy of people doing exactly what they want to be doing.

This little caravan is the rolling set of “Dreamchaser,” an unconventional travel/documentary show for Thai television focused on a man, a motorcycle, and his search for inspiring people and experiences. Their second season took them from Bangkok to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and back home again, and though they now have corporate sponsors, the spirit is still pure DIY. What separates this show from typical “on the road” reality TV fare is that it’s a bit of a creative dream for all involved.

The easy rider behind it all is Kamol Sukosol Clapp, aka “Sukie”, age 37, indie-rock impressario turned bike-loving adventurer. Born in Bangkok to a Thai mother and American father but raised partially in the States, Sukie’s fate was sealed when he heard ACDC’s “Highway to Hell” at age 12; he then asked his mother to buy him an electric guitar. In his early twenties, he and a few friends founded a record label called Bakery Music; the first indie label in Thailand, the first to sign acts like grunge rockers Modern Dog and pioneering MC Joey Boy, and the first to profit off of the explosion of the indie sound. He produced big bands and played in his own, the guitar-rock quartet Pru. “We were all young,” he recalls. “We were just kids doing what we wanted to do. We were in the right place at the right time, and it just grew and grew.”

Bakery’s growth led to it being bought by BEC-Tero/Sony BMG in 2004, at which point Sukie left the music biz. Which is when the mid-30s crisis hit. “Since I was 12 I had wanted to play music,” Sukie says, “and now I didn’t know what to do. I had no inspiration, no passion.” After six months of aimlessness, his friend suggested he get out of Bangkok for a while. So he bought a motorcycle and began riding around the countryside. In typical Sukie fashion, “one thing led to another,” and soon a TV show/cultural phenomenon was born.

The idea for the first season was simple: to motorcycle around Thailand, meeting interesting people who are following their dreams, such as the leader of an upcountry elephant sanctuary, or a young doctor on a small southern island who moonlights as a hipster-novelist. Maybe Sukie would stumble into his own next passion in the process. “It’s called Dreamchaser because I’m looking for my next dream,” he says. “I hoped the audience can watch it and be inspired to follow their own dream too.”

Sukie knew nothing about executive producing and hosting a television show, but luckily he had a good friend to bring along for the ride. “Dreamchaser” director Aditya “Juke” Assarat is a childhood friend of Sukie’s—and also happens to be one of Thailand’s most promising emerging filmmakers. After a similar youth spent in both Bangkok and the States, Assarat attended USC film school, and then became the first Thai filmmaker invited to the Sundance Directors Lab. He was also hand-picked by Mira Nair for a special Rolex mentorship on the strength of his quietly luminous shorts (one is presciently titled Motorcycle) and could have easily stayed in Los Angeles to go for the indie/Hollywood gold. Instead, he returned to Bangkok to work on quirkier projects, like the experimental collaboration Three Friends, assorted shorts, and a concert documentary for Sukie’s band Pru. He also set up Pop Pictures with friends/producers Soros Sukhum and Jetnipith Teerakulchanyut, with the aim of developing and shooting his first fiction feature Wonderful Town, as well as taking on other interesting projects and some commercial work to keep the machinery going.

When Sukie came to him with “Dreamchaser,” Assarat jumped right in. “‘Dreamchaser’ was my introduction to the TV business,” Assarat says. “None of the people involved in the show had ever done anything for TV before. So the first season was sort of learn-as-you-go.”

That first season saw Assarat and his steadfast crew of Pop Pictures collaborators trucking around the Thai countryside, following Sukie as he sped along rural routes, meeting with dreamers of all stripes, and generally enjoying life on the road.

Assarat compares the experience of directing “Dreamchaser” to a musical “jam session”—“All the previous plans go out the window and you mostly work in the moment; it’s very fresh and liberating, especially compared to making a movie, which is more constructed, story-boarded, and planned ahead of time.” The style reflects this—a breezy combination of vérité observation, interviews with featured guests, scenes of Sukie in traveler-mode, the occasional spill, and wild, unscripted moments, all guided by his casual narration and, of course, plenty of road tunes. “My background in music doesn’t really effect the TV show at all, other than making sure we have a damn good soundtrack!” Sukie laughs.

In spring of 2007, the finished program premiered on TITV, and seemed to strike a chord with the audience. Soon, on every upcountry trip he took, Sukie encountered average Thais who always asked the same question: Will there be a Season Two?

In the meantime, he released his memoir about the Bakery years (entitled Bakery & I) and waited for his director. Toward the end of 2007, Assarat’s Wonderful Town debuted on the festival circuit to acclaim, winning prizes from Pusan to Rotterdam. The spare drama follows a city architect coming to a small town hit hard by the 2004 tsunami, and the private confrontations he finds there. Wonderful Town shows a thoughtful auteur at work, with touches reminiscent of Tsai Ming-Liang and Assarat’s countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul—seemingly lightyears away from the revved-up fun of “Dreamchaser.” Which might be one reason he went back for a second helping.

For “Dreamchaser 2”, Sukie had even bigger plans. He wanted it to be more adventurous, with a tougher riding route. He wanted to go outside the Thai borders and cover all of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). The first season had the occasional celebrity guest as Sukie’s riding partner—such as the half-Laotian, half-Australian heartthrob Ananda Everingham (who has been called the hardest-working actor in Thai showbusiness). This time Sukie wanted to cast an unknown as his sidekick. And they wanted the show to raise money for charity, after the great success of raising funds through Season One for an elephant sanctuary featured on one episode. In short, they wanted “Dreamchaser” to truly be a vehicle for others’ dreams as well.

Halfway through the filming of Season Two, the “Dreamchaser” gang found themselves in Vientiane, having already weathered food poisoning in Vietnam and a police-escorted journey through the notoriously dangerous “Pink Route” between Bangkok and Mae Sot, among other surprises. There they visited Makphet, a bright and airy restaurant run by Friends International as a training kitchen for former street youth. Sukie joined in the kitchen for a bit as the kids got to work, and later sampled their curries and salads in the dining room. In other stops like Mae Jam, Hoa Binh, and Phnom Penh, they also shot innovative charity and community projects like dams and schools, balancing a social consciousness with the moments of pure adventure.

Riding alongside Sukie the whole way was Hui, the son of fruit farmers from Loei in Northern Thailand who was fresh out of his compulsory army service. He had been selected from an open call of over 200 people, just because he loved riding bikes and didn’t know what to do next with his life. Sukie sees himself as a sort of big-brother to Hui, and even expresses concern about his transition back to “real life.” “He’s loving it. I’m just a bit worried how he’ll adjust after the show, because he says ‘This is what I want to do, ride all day,’ and I think, ‘Well, you have to work, too.’”

Of course, Sukie is the enviable case who appears to have accomplished both in one stroke. Assarat feels as if he’s lucked out as well, but takes on various projects to keep Pop Pictures going and his staff in their jobs. “My life is balanced quite nicely between my films, where I am the director, and various other TV and commercial jobs, where often I am not the director. It’s the second category that keeps everyone employed.”

“Dreamchaser,” now picked up by the bigger Thai TV network Channel 3, is a perfect blend. “‘Dreamchaser’ is the project that everybody most looks forward to every year,” says Assarat. “It’s a two-month long road trip, visiting different places, doing crazy things; who wouldn’t want to be a part of it?” Indeed, for two months the Bangkok hipster kids of Pop Pictures get to transform into a scruffy but efficient unit of guerrilla creativity, bumping along the superhighways and jungle roads: three trucks, two motorcycles, two DV cameras, one mini-camera, one spy-camera, one high-megapixel digital camera, one boom and sound system (hooked up to a perpetually chain-smoking soundman in a vintage t-shirt), helmets, walkie-talkies, cellphones, and backpacks—most adorned with stickers of the retro monkey-face “Dreamchaser” logo. Then, of course, they return to the city for the hard work of editing all that footage.

“Dreamchaser 2” premiered in June, but this year went beyond just the TV set. The website is expanding with nearly 600 members registered only a few weeks after its launch, and books, DVDs, and bike-rallies are in the pipeline. In August, a large charity concert featuring old Bakery bands like Modern Dog helped raise nearly $9 million Thai Baht ($260,000 USD), and of course, some discussion about Season Three has begun. “We are considering Beijing to Istanbul, but it will require a lot of planning time and financing,” Sukie says. Also, rising star Assarat needs to schedule it around his next feature, a slightly personal tale of a US-raised Bangkok boy returning home, entitled High Society and starring the tireless Ananda Everingham.

The question remains: Has Sukie found his next dream after all? “I feel very fortunate to be doing what I’m doing,” he reflects, but cites a lesson he learned from the music industry: not to compromise himself or his artistic integrity too much, and to always keep it fun. “I want to take ‘Dreamchaser’ as far as I can but not to the point where it becomes too big and I am no longer in control of it, but it’s in control of me.” If ever that is the case, Sukie will probably just speed off into the sunset, chasing the next dream, and creating something undeniably special in the process.

Title: “Sign”
Type: Video by artist Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong)
Editor and Music Supervisor: Samantha Culp
Music: Lullatone
Details: HDV, PAL, 13 min., English subtitle, 2008

Description:
Sign is a 2-part video work by Leung Chi Wo exploring the idea of non-mainstream communication and the meaning of human reality overloaded by mass media.

Part I is an educational video featuring deaf teacher Laisarn (Laisarn Leong) and her shadow (Belle Reily) about the idea of baby signs in Auslan(Australian Sign Language) and the demonstration of basic signs with which parents can actually learn to communicate with their children whoever deaf or hearing. Whereas Laisarn communicates with the audience in Auslan, her shadow does it with her eyes and mind.

Part II is a fictional video showing a young mother in communication with her baby in Auslan. Though taking place in a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere, the mother tries to convey the words that she comes across every day, which can be harsh or discomforting. The juxtaposition of loving expression and hostile meaning depicts a surrealistic scene of our schizophrenic world. The vocabulary here is chosen from The Canberra Times.

Video editing by Samantha Culp; music by Lullatone.

More information

Title: “Reel Life: From Gotham to Graham Street”
Type: Biweekly Column on Hong Kong Film Scene (Columnist April-August 2008)
Publication: TimeOut Hong Kong
Date: Jul 2008
Article Link

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (not a Batcave), you probably know that one of the most anticipated films of the summer is The Dark Knight, and Hongkongers have a special reason to brave the queues on opening weekend. For a few surreal weeks last autumn, the production set up shop on our fair isle to shoot a few scenes – and I was lucky enough to help out as a lowly assistant and watch some of the action. The film was shrouded in more secrecy than some military operations, but I can at last share a few inside tidbits from behind the scenes.

First off, wasn’t Batman supposed to jump from a plane into Victoria Harbour, a stunt that was cancelled due to water pollution? Well, no. The official word was that the scene was cut because of script reasons, but perhaps it was because the Hong Kong government was too rigid on flight altitudes and safety regulations (which do you think is the most diplomatic answer?).

Batman does, however, stand on the top ledge of IFC looking down over Hong Kong – a feat accomplished by some expert safety-rigging and a very trusting Christian Bale clad in rubber mask and Batsuit (which, incidentally, travels in its own sleek black box the size of a small elevator.) As a clearly relieved Bale stepped back onto the main deck after a take, one cameraman chuckled: “Everyone is going to think it’s CGI anyway!”

One shot that is unmistakably verité was filmed on the Mid-Levels Escalator – and if you were anywhere in the neighborhood that day, it was hard to miss. What seemed like thousands of people were magnetically pulled to stand beneath the escalator, lean off of bamboo scaffolding, snap pictures on their mobiles, try to sneak past the security lines in Batman costumes… all for a glimpse of Bale (in Bruce Wayne daywear) and Morgan Freeman chatting innocuously on the rampway.

The Center and the Peninsula Hotel helipad also make appearances, as does that more questionable piece of the Hong Kong landscape we used to take for granted – Edison Chen. All I can say is that he seemed a bit pouty and that most of the Hollywood imports weren’t fawning over him.

Finally, Hong Kong is shot as Hong Kong, not some strange substitute for Gotham. Director Christopher Nolan seems to have quite a fondness for the city, and he supposedly wrote some of this script while shut up in the Hong Kong Four Seasons during a typhoon. Which is why everyone spent days at the West Kowloon Helicopter Pad, preparing aerial shot after aerial shot of the island and harbour (using special camera-equipped helicopters brought from the US – it’s nice to be a big-budget production).

Of course, it’s not like you need another reason to see The Dark Knight. But getting to watch a superhero roaming the streets where we run errands is pretty hard to beat.

Hong Kong has its fair share of iconic actors and actresses, but the biggest screen star of all is right under our feet. In the most memorable Hong Kong films, it’s the city itself that deserves top billing, and Hong Kong filmmakers are wise to capitalise on our greatest asset.

The result is a place where the urban and cinematic fabrics are so interwoven, it’s sometimes hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. We’ve all had a few life-imitates-film moments (try walking out of One Night in Mong Kok into actual Mong Kok and you’ll see what I mean), and certain neighbourhoods and landmarks are so frequently used that they risk becoming visual clichés. Others are so completely defined by one work that they become invisible (at least on the big screen) for some time.

One of these places is Tsim Sha Tsui’s Chungking Mansions, which has been surprisingly under-utilised since Wong Kar-wai made it an icon in the mid-90s. In Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, Wong looped his narrative strands through the labyrinthine hallways and cramped guesthouses of 36-44 Nathan Road, forever imprinting it upon the brains of international cinephiles. I was one of them, and my experience seeing Chungking Express in high school kick-started a passion for Hong Kong movies, and later Hong Kong itself.

When I moved here, a decade after the release of Express, I was curious to see how the real-life Mansions compared to the one glimpsed through Christopher Doyle’s hazy wide-angle lens. In short: quite different. Chungking now attracts a racially diverse mix of people, including a healthy contingent from Africa, and is considerably safer thanks to increased CCTV coverage. After exploring a changed Chungking, I began to think the location was due for a second look through the view-finder. At least a quick and dirty one.

Which is how, in recent weeks, I ended up haunting the hallways and guesthouses of Chungking with a boom mic and an eye out for the security guard. My partner and I plunged into this project, an experimental short documentary (to call it “indie” would be glamorising it), with both feet, and it’s unclear as of press time if we will emerge in one piece. Not because of any real danger (although there were a few moments where it seemed an unnamed government’s consulate wished to steal our camera and/or tapes). We made it through this, and the heat, and the rain, and the difficulty of trying to do pedestrian-control in a place that’s constantly like MTR at rush hour. But we have found, to our frustration (and, in our more zen moments, delight), that truth is always stranger than fiction, and the end of the story is still writing itself.

The nice news is that Chungking Mansions was always ready for a close-up. In some ways, Hong Kong’s iconic locations are the most reliable actors around.

In case you’d like to revisit a classic in a new form, the Criterion Collection recently announced they’ll be releasing Chungking Express on Blu-Ray sometime in October of this year. Go ahead, you deserve another (ahem, legal) copy.