I just completed the trailer for my Beijing Olympics film, Boomtown Beijing,just in time for the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival and the charity screening in Beijing on April 20th.
A big thank you to my friend, Zhou Hou Heng (周侯衡） , for helping me edit and package the trailer.
Watch the trailer here:
As the Beijing Olympics fast approaches, Western media organizations are quick to pull out the well-worn cliches about repressive regimes and the Olympic Games.
It is refreshing therefore to read this interview in the Seattle Times blog with Dr Susan Brownell, an American anthropologist who does research on sports in China and their connection with politics, culture and society.
You may want to read the entire interview but here are the two excerpts extracted by Danwei:
Politics, Beijing and the Olympic Games
What I find most interesting is Dr. Brownell’s proposition that major events like the Beijing Olympics are the accelerators of great change in China. This is a departure from the usual point of view that the staging of the Olympics is merely “window dressing” a great public relations push to present China in an acceptable light.
This is a perspective of someone who knows China well. Dr Brownell is a former athlete who has spent time living and studying in China.
But will her voice be heard amidst the din of China-bashing that has become “fashionable” in some media circles?
Technorati Tags: Beijing Olympics, 2008 Olympics, Beijing, China politics, sports, Susan Brownell
No matter how good my Mandarin is, I know that the Beijing-er can always tell that I am an outsider (外地人）from my accent.
I spent the best part of 2007, living out of a suitcase in Beijing, working on a documentary about the Beijing Olympics.
For someone from a small country like Singapore, Beijing is a sprawling city and I find that I spent a lot of time in a cab, trying to get from one end of the city to another.
Three minutes into my cab ride, The same question always comes up, “小姐，你是哪里人？” Miss, where are you from?” The subtext is of course, “You do not sound like one of us.”
In the process of making the film, I have come to a better appreciation of the Beijing accent and the Beijing dialect. While I was working on the sound-mix of my documentary, my Beijing born-and-bred sound engineers will cackle at phrases in my film while the nuances are completely lost on me.
It is great fun therefore to read this blog post, explaining what does the Beijing “R” sound mean?
Beijing Sounds – 北京的声儿 (link via Danwei)
My Beijing friends tell me that figuring out whether to end a word or phrase with the “R” sound, or “儿“声，is an art unto itself. I am sure an entire encyclopedia can be written on the “dos” and “don’ts”.
The outsider often betrays their very foreigness by trying too hard, ending each and every phrase with the “R” sound. As a result, they make a laughing stock of themselves.
What comes intuitively to the native Beijing-er may take a life-time of puzzling out for an outsider or 外地人like me.
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I recently presented my documentary about the Beijing Olympics at the Guangzhou International Documentary Festival.
Boomtown Beijing is my first independent film and making the festival poster for it was a big thrill. Mainly because of how last minute it all was. I got them printed the day I arrived in Guangzhou at a little print shop near the
A big thank you to Carrie Dee Cao Zhen Zhen, a graduate student at SYSU who helped me pull it together. She also coordinated and publicized my guest lectures at the university.
Talk about useful local knowledge!
Whenever I tell people I am making a documentary about the Olympics, one of the first questions they ask me is: “Are you featuring athletes?”
When I say that I am making a film about ordinary people and their Olympics dreams, the response I often get is one of surprise, even of incredulity.
But I can point to ample evidence of the extraordinary efforts some Chinese people have invested into dramatizing their passion for the Olympics.
Check out this story about a man who has modified his bike into the shape of the Olympics logo:
Sunday Photo: Olympics Logo Bike :: China Digital Times (CDT) 中国数字时代
Talk about grand gestures…
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