Penang Watch

The filming of Chew Jetty doco would be 1 year by September ie today! We are quite near to finish now -with only a few days ahead of the launch at KOMAS' Freedom Film Fest from Sept 14th-16th (KL). The film is at the final stage of audio editing -with music and sound mastering to be fine tuned. There has been some promotion done by a few local media-the last of which is the 8TV's `Quickie' program(which will go on air closed to midnight, to be broadcasted over 3 weeks.) The write up by Star had started to feature another winner of the Freedom Film Fest winner's film (Fahmi Reza's historical doco) last week -to be followed by another instalment about the clan jetty film tomorrow! Look out the paper. I had been called by the journalist to update the interview she did last month about the film as well as the location(Chew Jetty). She asked some good question about conservation eg whether changing some wooden plank at the jetties (changed only in last general elections) amount to concern over conservation by the politicians!

I told her that the priorities there are sanitation and land tenure, which can be addressed under the application for World Heritage City. But we don't have state laws to gazzet any Penang's heritage (unlike in Melaka), and all pronouncements on heritage are based only on City Councils' very discretionary and corruptible regulations.

Doing this film involved camping at the KOMAS' office for about 2 weeks now-though I did go back a few times. Not an easy adjustment as there are many things waiting to be done in Penang eg I missed a screening of the Penang Film Club's fortnightly film cum discussion session. Hope that went well.

The filming experience did help me with new experience which can only give more encouragement for further film/video/new media ventures. The way to go!

Ong BK