Fat Bidin Media

As you all probably already know, I was a mentor for the recent Apostrophe competition organised by DiGi. Seven winners were selected (you can see their works here) and they all won a chance to go on a filmmaking trip to Hanoi, Vietnam, with me as their all-knowledgeable and infinitely intellectual mentor!

The winners are:
Amir Rashid Othman
Fatul Ghazali
Johan Arif Mazlan
Nik Ahmad Faiz
Tan Zi Hao
Lesly Leon Lee
Azizan Abdul Rahim (DiGi internal winner)

The trip to Hanoi was great! Although documentary filmmakers and journalists would call it parachuting (they only had 3 days to make a film there!), the guys were gung-ho from the get-go! The picture above is of them being interviewed by ntv7.

Aside from filming, the organizers also arranged a slew of activities. We met up with a group of Vietnamese filmmakers at Red Bridge Productions. Getting their perspective on filmmaking was an eye-opener. The picture above is of me with Bui Kim Quy, a young Vietnamese documentary filmmaker.

We also met up with a a group of young Hanoi artists who shared with us stories of their struggle in creating art in their country. Respect goes out to them.

And staying true to the whole Apostrophe theme of ‘Makan’, we learnt how to cook traditional Vietnamese dishes from the beautiful Hanh An at Hidden Hanoi.

But nothing could beat the PHO BO (Vietnamese beef noodles) you get on the streets!!

So it really wasn’t that hard for the guys to come up with a film (I’ll try and post the final film they did… if I can get my hands on a copy… FATUL!!). A nice dinner screening was held for an audience which consisted of the Malaysian contingent and the Vietnamese filmmakers and artists.

There were a bunch of reporters (The Star, New Straits Times, ntv7 and China Press) who were following us around. So watch out for write-ups and TV coverage. In fact, ntv7’s The Breakfast Show is running a 3-part package on Apostrophe starting yesterday and will continue till Friday. You can tune in from 8am to 10am.