China – Page 3 – Open Minds!

Channel News Asia at 10: Making of a pan-Asian news channel

“We’re the messenger for all the stories that might not have been told…that’s our job,” says Glenda Chong, the Shanghai-based China correspondent (and former anchor) of Channel NewsAsia (CNA), the Singapore-based Asian regional news broadcaster that just turned 10.

For a decade, CNA has covered Asia for Asians and the rest of the world. It has uncovered stories missed – or ignored – by other, global news channels. Just as important, it has also found the Asian voices and angles in mega stories originating from Asia that gripped the world’s attention — such as the outbreak of SARS, Indian Ocean tsunami, earthquakes in Sichuan and Kashmir.

Started on 1 March 1999 and owned by Singapore’s MediaCorp, CNA is now a major Asian news broadcaster with programmes telecast to more than 20 Asian countries and territories. Visit CNA’s 10th anniversary website for a look back…and forward.

“In the early days, when we talked about a news channel from Singapore, you could cut the cynicism with a knife,” said Woon Tai Ho, managing director of MediaCorp News.

That was inevitable for any media venture anchored in Singapore, ranked currently at 144 out of 173 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. But CNA has shown that geography need not be destiny.

In 10 years, it has emerged as a primary source of news in Asia, and along the way, has picked up a plethora of high-profile awards — including two silver medals at the New York Festivals 2009 and three awards at Asia Television Awards 2008.

Channel News Asia turns 10 – article in Today newspaper, Singapore: 2 March 2009

Started as a business news channel at the tail end of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, CNA later evolved into a fully-fledged news and current affairs channel covering all facets, aspects and territories of Asia – the world’s largest region, home to half of humanity. Map showing CNA geographical coverage

Ironically, CNA enters double-digits chronicling the region once again in the midst of a financial crisis, this time of global proportions and repercussions.

Unlike Al Jazeera English (AJE), the global news channel launched from Qatar in November 2006, CNA has relied on Asian talent for anchoring and reporting. While AJE has shamelessly and desperately tried to ape the BBC, CNA has forged its own identity in offering a world class product.

Whereas AJE tries so hard to please its audiences in Europe and North America (is it so anxious for western acceptance?), CNA has focused its energies in telling the myriad stories of emerging Asia primarily for Asia’s upwardly mobile, burgeoning middle classes.

For example, when an interviewee gives his/her views in a language other than English, Channel NewsAsia does not voice-over the original audio with an anglo-saxon voice like other major news channels do. Instead, an English subtitle appears, preserving and complementing the original audio.

At TVE Asia Pacific, we have had a positive experience of engaging this regional broadcaster. In late 2005, we were looking for a broadcast partner to co-produce a documentary looking back at the first year after the Indian Ocean tsunami through the eyes of eight survivor families – in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand – that we had tracked on video under the Children of Tsunami project. We had a mass of professionally and ethically filmed material, and a unique collection of stories we were keen to be amplified to the world.

When we approached Channel NewsAsia through a friend, they immediately welcomed the collaboration. They invested their time, resources and talent to edit Children of Tsunami: No More Tears, a half hour that distilled some of the stories that we had painstakingly captured for a year. No money changed hands. Legalities were kept to a minimum. CNA saw we had a story that was relevant and important for their viewers. They found the story authentic, as captured by local crews who spoke the language in each country and who lived through the traumas of the tsunami themselves (no ‘parachute film crews’ were involved). So CNA just did it — with none of the airs of pomposity and self importance that so characterise the BBC in any collaboration.

CNA producer Joanne Teoh Kheng Yau shared her experience in telling this story at a regional event we organised in December 2006. The full experience is now documented in a chapter in our book, Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book.

Children of Tsunami: No More Tears was first broadcast globally on Channel NewsAsia in the last week of December 2005 to mark the tsunami’s first anniversary with this intro: “Young survivors of the Asian tsunami let us into their lives to personalise the mass of statistics, aid pledges and recovery plans. ‘Children of Tsunami’ is a tapestry of intimate stories, woven by voices of individual and collective resilience, heroism and recovery.”

Children of Tsunami: No More Tears Part 1:

Beijing 2008: So what’s a little fake for a cuter Olympics?

The world saw Lin Miaoke, right, sing at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony - but actually heard the voice of Yang Peiyi, left.

So now it’s confirmed: the spectacular Beijing Olympics opening ceremony – watched live on television by over a billion people worldwide – had been a little more than what it seemed.

What we saw was not what we actually heard. It turns out that the little girl in a red dress, who sang “Ode to the Motherland” as China’s flag was paraded into Beijing’s National Stadium, wasn’t really singing. Clever stage management and sound mixing just made us believe she was.

Beijing games organisers have confirmed that Lin Miaoke, aged 9, whom we saw on TV, was lip-syncing to the sound of another girl, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, who was only heard but not seen — all because she was deemed not “cute enough”. And they just forgot to tell us there were two…

To refresh memories, here’s that moment from 8 August 2008, as captured by China’s national broadcaster CCTV:

Since the story broke a couple of days later, it has been covered very widely in print, broadcast and online media. There has been particularly good coverage in the New York Times.

An extract from that story:

“The Chinese government has taken great pains to present the best possible image to the outside world during the Olympics, and perfection was the goal for the dazzling opening ceremonies. The filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who oversaw the production, has earned international praise for staging a performance that many considered one of the most spectacular in Olympic history.

“But to achieve the spectacular, not only did organizers fake the song, but they also have acknowledged that one early sequence of the stunning fireworks shown to television viewers actually included digitally enhanced computer graphics used for ‘theatrical effect.'”

And here’s how CNN covered the news of the fake incident on 12 August 2008:

The blogosphere is teeming with discussions on this — and not just in English. It sure raises a number of concerns.

The Olympic motto is made up of three Latin words: “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, which mean “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. At the rate things are moving — with media images taking precedence over accomplishment — we might soon find ‘cuter’ being annexed to it. (Somebody please find the right Latin word.)

But let’s face it: this is not the first time that the world’s greatest festival has been carefully stage-crafted for the benefit of broadcast television, nor will it be the last. The pressure on host nations is immense to show their best face to the world. Perhaps our Chinese friends took that literally, and opted to showcase the supposedly cuter Lin Miaoke to the billion plus audience. (Apparently, a party official deemed that the face of little Miss Yang Peiyi wasn’t good enough – both look perfectly adorable to me…)

Not for a moment do I condone the trickery that Beijing tried to get away with. At the same time, let this be seen as part of a growing, disturbing trend: the broadcast television ‘tail’ has been wagging the Olympics dog for quite some time.

Since the summer Olympics were first commercially broadcast in Rome in 1960, both television’s technology and industry have advanced leaps and bounds. Today, broadcast rights are a very significant source of income for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the host countries/cities.

As the IOC official website says: “Increases in broadcast revenue over the past two decades have provided the Olympic Movement and sport with an unprecedented financial base.” And according to the most recent data available, theat revenue accounts for a little over half of all the income that Olympic marketing generates.

That’s all well and good — much of competitive sport today relies so heavily on corporate sponsorships, and television rights are a key part of sports financing.

However, we must worry when so much time, effort, creativity and money is being invested in staging ever more spectacular opening (and to a lesser extent, closing) ceremonies. Yes, it’s a time for the world to celebrate the best and the brightest of the Global Family. And there’s absolutely no harm in having a gala party. But should that extend to rolling out all the tricks of showbiz and make belief? With such a massive global audience following the games not just on television but now also online, where do the IOC and hosts draw the line?

As the world becomes more and more media saturated, these pressures are only set to increase. This year, for the first time, the IOC also allowed online video platform YouTube (owned by Google) to carry about three hours a day of exclusive content — summaries and highlights — from Olympic Broadcasting Services on a dedicated channel.

Let’s not kid ourselves: the world of broadcast television distorts reality on a daily basis. This is an industry that prefers and promotes those whom it considers more cute, pretty, good-looking and sexy. It makes no secret of choosing style over substance. And not just in pure entertainment, but in ALL areas of coverage, including news and current affairs. I have been pointing out how this also affects the coverage of issues like poverty, disasters and development. Even in such serious, factual coverage, many television producers would go with faces that they think are tele-genic, cute or at least particularly pathetic-looking…

Television audiences, by and large, have come to terms with all these ‘adjustments and improvements’ to the murky, messy and unruly real world (yes, some pockets of resistance are fighting a brave vanguard battle, but their numbers are no match for the uncritical couch potatoes).

The challenge is when the real world of Olympic sports tries to mix with the make-belief world of broadcast television to reach out to all those billions of eyeballs. Whose values, standards and rules would then apply?

While the IOC jealously guards time-cherished Olympic principles, it has been slow to modernise and keep up with the times. It must find ways to balance the Olympics integrity with media’s obsession for manufactured reality and feel-good, look-great extravaganzas. And if IOC thinks manging broadcast rights is tricky, just wait till they have to deal with the more bewildering and multitudinous online and mobile media platforms…

What happened in Beijing once again rekindles a long simmering debate. It goes much deeper than an overzealous host nation trying to picture-perfect its proud moment. It takes us right to the heart of the Olympics, and tests if the founding ideals can survive the corporate media realities of the twenty first century.

Road to Bali: Beware of ‘Bad weather friends’!

All the environmental roads — well, actually flights — seem to lead to Bali in the coming days.

The Indonesian ‘Island of the Gods’, famed as a tourist resort, will play host to the 13th United Nations Climate Change Conference from 3 to 14 December 2007.

The Conference, hosted by the Government of Indonesia, brings together representatives of over 180 countries together with observers from inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the media. The two week period includes the sessions of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), its subsidiary bodies as well as the Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol.

The Bali meeting will be a turning point in the global response to climate change, an issue which has moved above and beyond being a simple ‘green’ concern to one with economic, security and social implications. The annual meeting returns to Asia after five years, since New Delhi, India, hosted the 8th meeting in November 2002.

In the build up to Bali, a new report released on 19 November 2007 says that without immediate action, global warming is set to reverse decades of social and economic progress across Asia, home to over 60 per cent of the world’s population.

Up in Smoke? Asia and the Pacific – with a foreword by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – is the most extensive and concluding chapter of a unique, four-year long exercise by the Up in Smoke coalition, an alliance of the UK’s major environment and development groups.

The report shows “how the human drama of climate change will largely be played out in Asia, where almost two thirds of the world’s population live, effectively on the front line of climate change.”

When our friends at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London sent me the press release about the report last week, something caught my eye. Among the several accompanying quotes was this one concerning the media:

“In many Asian countries climate change stories don’t make it into the media, so the public are left out of the debate. The challenge for decision-makers and the media is to stimulate interest in their work and translate the complex issues into stories that capture the public’s imagination. Climate change above all requires the engagement of everyone in creating the changes required.”

This sweeping statement is attributed to Rod Harbinson, Head of Environment, Panos London.

I know Panos London well, and am surprised to read an official remark of this nature emerging from that organisation which, until recently, has tried to relate to the majority world media as a friend and supporter. In fact, the first time I had one of my own pieces internationally syndicated was by Panos Features, back in 1989.

Come to think of it, the second article I wrote for Panos Features concerned how the low-lying, Indian Ocean island nation of Maldives was preparing for adverse impacts of climate change. That was years before the web, so there’s no link I can provide.

As a development writer and journalist who has covered global climate change among other issues for two decades, I have problems with Mr Harbinson’s remark.

Drik/Majorityworld
Photo: A family looks for shelter using a raft made of banana trees during the last Monsoon: 31 July 2007: Gaibandha, Bangladesh © Quddus Alam/DrikNews Linked from Shahidul News

I’m in full agreement on the need to ‘translate the complex issues into stories that capture the public’s imagination’. There is also no argument that climate change requires the engagement of everyone.

But I would be very interested to know on what statistical or analytical basis he says “in many Asian countries climate change stories don’t make it into the media, so the public are left out of the debate’.

Asia, as Mr Harbinson should surely know, is not just China, India and Indonesia. It is large and highly diverse region, containing five sub-regions as defined by the UN. It is home to nearly two thirds of humanity, who live in over three dozen independent states or dependent territories.

Living in Asia and trying to work at regional level, I know how difficult it is to make any generalisations about this rich and constantly changing assortment of economies, cultures and societies branded as Asia (which, taken together with the small island nations of the South Pacific, is known as the Asia Pacific). In fact, it’s wise not to speak about Asia as a whole, for there is little in common, say, between Japan and Laos, or between China and Maldives.

The Asian media are as diverse as the region, and have been undergoing rapid change in recent years. Unshackled from the state’s crushing grip in most countries, the broadcast media (radio, TV) have proliferated and emerged as the primary source of information for a majority of Asians. New media – web, mobile devices and multimedia combinations – are now changing the way many Asia’s communicate and access information.

I have always been curious how Panos London, perched at its cosy home in London’s White Lion Street, assesses what goes on in the majority world. In this case, how much of Asia does Mr Harbinson know and is really familiar with? How many Asian media outlets has he or Panos monitored, assessed and sampled before coming to this sweeping and damning conclusion about the lack of climate change stories in the Asian media?

And how many of these outlets are radio and TV, and in languages other than English? I would really like to know.

If Panos London believes in evidence-based analysis, then it owes us in Asia an explanation as to on what basis its head of environment makes such statements about an entire continent, whose media output is predominantly in Asian languages, not English. And whose principal media are broadcast, not print.

And what constitutes a climate story? Tracking the endless array of inter-governmental babble in the name of working out some compromised partial solution to the major problem? Or reporting on campaigns to clean up polluting industries or sectors (such as transport) that generate most of the greenhouse gases? Or focusing on how humble communities in remote corners of the world are finding how their lifestyles and livelihoods are suddenly threatened by something they hardly understand?

To me, it’s all of the above — and a lot more. Climate change is akin to a prism through which many, many development issues and topics can be analysed. Just as HIV/AIDs long ago ceased to be a simple medical or health story, climate change has moved well beyond being an environmental story.

The more angles, perspectives and topics that are covered in the media, the better. And all of it need not be in that staid, cautiously balanced style of The Guardian or BBC that Panos London must be more familiar with.

Panos London, in its statement of beliefs, says ‘Freedom of information and media pluralism are essential attributes of sustainable development’. Surely, then, they realise that media pluralism includes speaking in a multitude of tongues, and analysing from many different perspectives — as happens in the Asian media 24/7, if Mr Harbinson and his colleagues care to spend more time in the region and keep their eyes and ears open.

But instead, they seem more like a group of well-meaning people with a solution in search of a problem. For the past many months, Panos London has been crying wolf about the allegedly poor coverage of climate issues in the majority world media.

That was the main thrust of a report they published in late 2005, titled Whatever the weather – media attitudes to reporting climate change.

According to Panos London website that I have accessed today, “…the survey found that there is little knowledge among journalists about these important choices and they are rarely discussed. The dramatic impacts of extreme weather events, for example, rarely feature in relation to climate change and the topic remains low on editors’ story sheets.”

The survey was based on ‘interviews conducted with journalists and media professionals in Honduras, Jamaica, Sri Lanka and Zambia’ and claimed to ‘give insights into the attitudes of journalists and the status of the media in these countries.’

Well, I was one of those majority world journalists covered by the survey — and I had major reservations about how they used my responses. Being cautious, I had used email (and not the phone) to respond to their survey questions – I therefore have a complete record of everything I said. When the draft report was shared on my request, I found some of my responses being distorted or taken out of context. I had to protest very strongly before some accuracy was restored. I later regretted having agreed to be part of this dubious survey.

It was flawed in many ways. The questionnaire was very poorly conceived and structured. I actually declined to answer some questions which were worded in such a way as to elicit just the kind of response that Panos London wanted — to make a case that journalists in the majority world are so incompetent that they need help.

A glaring omission in the final report was that it carried no list of journalists interviewed. I had to ask several times before I could even find out how many others participated in the survey (apparently some three dozen). But my requests for a list of other survey respondents were repeatedly declined by Panos London, who said it was privileged information. They later took the position that European data protection laws did not allow them to disclose this information!

In an email sent to Rod Harbinson on 22 Feb 2006, I said: “I would argue that Panos London had pre-conceived notions that it wanted to present in this report, and used superficial and largely unprofessional interview surveys with a few scattered journalists as a rubber-stamping exercise to publish what it wanted to say anyway. This is further borne out by the fact that some of my more outspoken responses have been completely ignored.”

I have seen or heard nothing since to change the above view. And the contents of Whatever the weather – media attitudes to reporting climate change are consistent with what Rod Harbinson says in the IIED press release that prompted me to make this comment.

Yes, climate change is the Big Issue of our times that needs everyone to rally around and search for ‘common but differentiated’ solutions and responses. But no issue or global threat is too big to warrant the willing suspension of time-honoured journalistic or academic values of honesty, integrity and balance. Issuing lop-sided ‘survey reports’ and making sweeping negative statements do not help the cause of improving public discussion and debate on climate change.

The road to Bali and beyond is going to be an arduous journey. On that treacherous road, we in the majority world need to beware of ‘bad weather friends’ who come bearing bad surveys and self-serving offers of ‘help’.

— Nalaka Gunawardene

Note: In the spirit of communication for development and media pluralism, I invite Panos London to respond to the above critique, and offer to publish their response in full.

I remain a critical cheer-leader of the global Panos family, and serve on the Board of Panos South Asia, an entirely independent entity that has excellent relations with Panos London. Like all families, we don’t always agree – and that’s part of media pluralism!

Crossing the other Digital Divide: Challenge to conservation community

Digital Divide refers to the gap between those who have regular, easy access to modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) and those who don’t. In the past decade, the IT industry and development community have launched various initiatives to bridge this divide. The One Laptop Per Child project is among the better known examples.

As digital technologies and media gain momentum and wider coverage than ever before, another kind of digital divide has emerged. This week in Kathmandu, during the Fourth Asian Conservation Forum, some of us have been talking about this new divide — between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.

This latter divide is mainly a product of age, not socio-economics. Market research and sociological studies now confirm that today’s younger people – raised on a diet of mobile phones, video games and mp3 (music) players – have radically different ways of accessing, receiving and coping with information.

Recognising this new Digital Divide is vital for communication and advocacy work of conservation groups, such as IUCN – The World Conservation Union, conveners of the Kathmandu forum.

For nearly 60 years, IUCN has been an effective platform for knowledge-based advocacy. Using scientific evidence and reasoning, it has influenced conservation policies, laws and practices at country and global levels. The world would be a worse place to live in if not for this sustained advocacy work by thousands of experts and activists who were mobilised by IUCN.

Much of that work has been accomplished through the classical advocacy tools: scientific papers, books, conferences and, in recent years, ‘policy dialogues’ — meetings where experts and activists would sit down and talk things through with those who make policy in governments and industry.

IUCN continues to pursue all these methods, with creditable impact. IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species, whose latest edition is being released today (12 September 2007), is among the best known examples of how the Union’s work informs and inspires urgent action for saving the world’s animals and plants driven to the edge by human activity.

To remain similarly effective in the coming years, IUCN — and the rest of the conservation community — need to evolve and adapt to changing realities in human society. One such reality is the proliferation of ICTs in the past two decades.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced recently that the world’s telephone connections had passed four billion. Largely thanks to the explosion of mobile phones in the majority world, the total number of telephones (fixed and mobile) had quadrupled in the past decade.

While exact figures are hard to come by, it is estimated that around 1.17 billion people (almost 1 in 6 persons) have access to the Internet, even though varying levels of quality.

These are the more widely quoted figures, but the media mix keeps diversifying even as the size of the overall ‘ICT pie’ keeps increasing. For example, the 1990s saw a channel explosion in both FM radio and television across much of Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America, hugely increasing viewers’ choice and enhancing the outreach of broadcasting. The popularity of video games (and now, online games) has spawned trans-boundary subcultures that were inconceivable even a decade ago.

It is this bewilderingly media-enriched world that IUCN’s members and experts are trying to engage, hoping to persuade everyone — from governments and industry to communities and individuals — to live and work as if the planet mattered.

In Kathmandu this week, I argued that scientific merit and rational (and often very articulate) reasoning alone won’t win them enough new converts to achieve significant changes in lifestyles, attitudes and practices. To be heard and heeded in the real world outside the charmed development and conservation circles, we need to employ a multitude of platforms, media and ICT tools. And we have to talk in the language of popular culture.

We have come a long way since the 1980s, with the new ICTs evolving parallel to our own understanding of sustainability.

When we were involved in processes leading up to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, back in 1992, most of us were still using fax and snailmail to exchange information. Email was confined to academic circles and the web was not even conceived.

By the time Johannesburg Summit was held a decade later, email had come into wide use and static websites were being used to disseminate information and opinions. E-commerce and music file sharing were gaining momentum.

Just five years on, the rapidly evolving web 2.0 offers us more tools and platforms to not just engage in one-way dissemination, but to truly communicate with a two-way flow. Wikis allow participatory document drafting. Web logs or blogs enable faster, easier expression and discussion. YouTube and other platforms have suddenly made sharing of moving images much simpler (assuming we have sufficient bandwidth).

In fact, connectivity is improving in many parts of the world, though there still are many gaps, frustrations and cost issues to be resolved. Young people, under 25 years, are leading the charge in entering and ‘colonising’ the new media. Social networking platforms such as MySpace and FaceBook are only the tip of this cyber iceberg. And virtual worlds — such as Second Life, with over 8 million online members — are moving in from the periphery to occupy a clear niche in our new digital world.

Every indication is that these trends will continue. IUCN and other conservationists, with their rigorous scientific analysis expressed in technical papers, print publications and the occasional op ed article in a broadsheet newspaper, have to navigate in this whirlpool — and it’s not easy. But their choice is between engagement and marginalisation. The planet cannot afford the latter.

I’m not suggesting that conservation scientists and organisations must drop their traditional advocacy methods and rush to embrace the new ICT tools. But they need to survey the new media landscape with an open mind and identify opportunities to join the myriad global conversations.

A good part of that is what intellectuals might see as chatter, or tabloid culture. It’s precisely this mass tabloid audience that needs to be engaged for conservation.

There are inspiring examples of how other sections of the development spectrum are seizing new media opportunities:

* Some humanitarian groups now use Google Earth online satellite maps for their information management and advocacy work, for example in Darfur, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.

* In an attempt to name and shame offenders, human rights activists are using YouTube to post incriminating video evidence of human rights abuses worldwide. The influential Foreign Affairs journal recently called this the YouTube Effect.

Fortunately, at least a few Asian conservation leaders already appreciate this enormous new media potential. In Kathmandu, Surendra Shrestha, UNEP’s regional director for Asia Pacific, echoed my views.

“My young kids spend several hours each weekend in virtual worlds. We need to get in there and engage them with our content,” he said. “To do that, we have to get inside their minds, and speak their language.”

Shrestha mentioned how UNEP in Asia is attempting this with ICT-based projects for youth, such as e-generation which, according to him, has involved half a million young people.

Such initiatives are beginning to happen, thanks to a few conservationists who are pragmatic enough to exploit the inevitable. But much more needs to be done to make conservation ‘cool’ and hip for Asia’s youthful population, half of them under 35, and many of them Digital Natives.

For sustainability measures to have a chance of success, these upwardly mobile, spend-happy youth have to be reached, touched and persuaded. If it takes tabloid tactics to achieve this, so be it.

And given Asia’s growing economic clout and ecological impact – with China and India leading the way – the fate of the planet will be decided by what is done, or not done, in our region.

While they debate the finer points of conservation strategies and activities in Kathmandu, Bangkok and other cities across our massive region, Asia’s conservation community must quickly cross the new Digital Divide that currently separates them from Digital Natives.

Declaration of interest: I was part of IUCN Sri Lanka Secretariat (1992-1994), where I started its communication division, and have been a member of IUCN Commission on Education and Communication since 1991.

Read my April 2007 post: Do ICTs make a difference?

A girl named Nan Nan…

Nan Nan is a young girl living in Guo Zhuang Village, in China’s Anhui province. Her parents died of AIDS sometime ago, and she now lives with an older sister — and HIV.

After her parents’ death, the two girls were shunned by relatives and left to live without adult care. “Little Flower,” Nan Nan’s teenage sister, is about to get married. She vows not to tell the groom about her sibling’s disease.

Nan Nan is one China’s estimated 75,000 (and growing) AIDS orphans. She is one of several children whose depressing story is captured in a documentary film, The Blood of the Yingzhou District (China/USA, 40 mins, 2006).

I watched this film last afternoon at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC as part of the DC Environmental Film Festival. For me, it was one of the highlights of the festival. After all, this film won the Oscar award for Best Documentary, Short Subjects (while Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for best documentary feature).

Notwithstanding the giggly woman moderator provided by the host institution, and even in the absence of any representative from the film’s producers – China AIDS Media Project — the audience managed to have fairly good discussion with a representative from Family Health International who was panelist to discuss the issue of AIDS orphans.

Accoring to FHI, some 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS — and the numbers continue to grow as the pandemic consumes men and women of child-bearing age.

But the millions and billions don’t make much sense to most people. It’s hard to visualise more than a few thousand, let alone millions. This is something that UN agencies – all claiming to be serving the poor and disadvantaged – often forget: they dabble in the abstract, theoretical and statistical matters far removed from real people, real issues.

In that sense, films like The Blood of the Yingzhou District take us close to the unfolding human tragedies behind big numbers.

This is just what we tried to do in our own Children of Tsunami media project, in which producing a documentary film was one of many outputs across different media platforms and formats.

A question was asked how the film has been received in China. The giggly moderator informed us that it is allowed to be screened in China, which is encouraging. But the Chinese response to the film has been mixed, as can be expected. See this interesting exchange online.

What impressed me the most was the film’s subtle yet powerful use of soundtrack – a good mix of music, natural sounds and spoken voices. Some featured children did seem a bit like acting at times, but that didn’t detract the film’s value too much, at least for me.

Truly a moving image creation that moves people!

See trailer on YouTube.