Ling U

Karl CHAN Chak Lam

I am grateful for being the first awardee of the Chamber of Young Snow Curatorial Scholarship which has supported my internship on curatorial practice at the Film Culture Centre (Hong Kong) (FCCHK) in the summer of 2020.

In recent years, a significant wave of Hong Kong film productions has regained audience's attention to local culture and films of the 1980s. During my internship, I submitted a proposal to FCCHK for organising a documentary educational programme entitled “Documentary Screening Series 2020”. Although there was a delay in launching the programme due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, with the general public’s growing interest in films, this project has achieved satisfactory results.

I got involved in the curatorial work of a film programme for the first time. FCCHK provided adequate project resources for me, while their professional advice on curatorial practice was particularly useful. As the first event of the programme, we wanted to start with a local documentary and invited the film director Mr Ma Chi Hang as our guest speaker to introduce his newly published documentary Ballad on the Shore. This documentary film tells the stories of “fish-song” culture and the life of local fishermen. With Mr Ma’s consent, we showed a 20-minute short clip of his new documentary in order to promote Hong Kong documentary films and enable participants to learn about the local documentary industry.