Hanoi Filmmakers – Sarah Macdonald – Ten Alps Asia

November 2009

Sarah Macdonald, Managing Director of Ten Alps Asia, is producing a First Time Filmmakers competition for Discovery Channel in Vietnam. Ten Alps Asia site  Every day, throughout his adult life, Mr Long has cycled 10 miles across Hanoi from Silk village where he was born, to the Zoo.   Strapped to the back of his bike is a metal case containing his battered Russian made film projector, hundreds of hand-painted cartoons cut-out cards, a zoetrope and 3-D glasses with 3-D photographic books.   

Outside the Zoo, Mr Long swings his arm wildly, clanging a bell that will call the children to join him in his makeshift, open-air cinema.  Mr Long’s form of movie-making is a duet, an experience given by him to children one by one.   He sits them down on small plastic stools, takes a twisted coat hanger with a plastic cup on one end, straps one cup to the ear of the child and the other to his own mouth.  As the child watches a cartoon of a Disney wolf chasing a little pig, hand spooled, Mr Long will provide verbal action with accents, song and sound effects.  He offers air-conditioning at no extra cost by fanning the child, and throws different perfumes in front of their noses for smellorama.    

Mr Long is a legend in Hanoi. 

 Entire generations have grown up being entertained by this man so obsessed with his own form of cinema that he long ago abandoned all notion of doing anything else.  But the children don’t rush to the sound of his bell quite like they used to and age is catching up.  Mr Long says he has just one last major ‘cinematic’ experience left in him before he hangs up his hanger header phones for one last time.  And we are there to capture its creation. 

As part of First Time Filmmakers, a Vietnamese director has been given a grant by the Ford Foundation to make his own 30-minute documentary about Mr Long’s final story.  It will be screened on the Discovery channel in 2010. 

Ten Alps Asia, the new Singapore-based factual production company, is producing five FTFM films for Discovery, guiding five winning entries to the competition through their first documentary production for an international audience.   

Check out the five winning film ideas on www.firsttimefilmmakers.com.vn