Yau Chui-yan – SCMP – Oct 01, 2008
An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about global warming presented by former US vice-president Al Gore, was a box-office blockbuster that brought global warming to the world’s attention.
Now Hong Kong is going to have its own version of An Inconvenient Truth, albeit shorter and not presented by a green statesman.
From today, a 30-second movie trailer called Climate Crisis will screen in eight Broadway cinemas around the city. The short will screen for three weeks, and is expected to reach more than 55,000 viewers.
It will be the first such film specifically targeting a Hong Kong audience and highlighting climate change.
Oxfam Hong Kong, which produced the film, hopes the short will attract younger audiences and get them to pay more attention to the consequences of global warming.
“It is more effective to arouse people’s attention by using moving images in cinemas, as people are sitting there attentively,” Fiona Shek Hoi-wai, the communications officer of Oxfam Hong Kong, said.
In the movie trailer, a young Hong Kong girl uses a hair dryer and leaves the fridge door open for a long time, just as many people do in their daily lives. The movie contrasts such behaviour with footage of ice melting at the North Pole and someone losing their family because of flooding.
“The film is intended to arouse people’s consciousness about the relationship between excessive consumption of energy and damage to somebody’s home elsewhere,” Ms Shek said.
“To many people in Hong Kong, climate change is only about the environment. However, this is not the full picture: climate change also affects many people’s lives. The girl in the movie can use moisture cream when the weather is dry. However, for people in Africa, the dryness will affect agriculture and damage the people’s livelihoods.”
Producers Huang Kwai-fung, 28, and Chow Tze-chun, 23, said their understanding of climate change increased markedly from producing the movie.
“Some of my friends did question the relationship between our excessive consumption of energy and disasters happening elsewhere. However, I became deeply impressed [by the strength of that relationship] while making this movie,” said Huang, who was a prize winner at this year’s Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards. The production cost HK$15,000.