EVENT VIDEOGRAPHY
VIDEO JOURNALISM
The Kowloon Walled City was a melting pot of vice and crime, born out of a loophole in the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898) that left it largely ungoverned and lawless. Over the next near-century, it bubbled up and out, held back only by gang fights, fires and flight path regulations accommodating the neighbouring Kai Tak Airport. It wasn’t until the decade preceding Hong Kong’s 1997 handover that plans to demolish the Walled City were finally agreed upon and executed—it had become a source of shame in the eyes of the colonial government that they were desperate to remove before returning Hong Kong to China.
In April of 2014, exactly twenty years following the completion of the Kowloon Walled City’s demolition, The Wall Street Journal released a web-interactive and documentary film exhibiting the grittiest of details of the lawless labyrinth. In the research process, never-before-seen footage and documentation were uncovered from various primary sources. The final product garnered more than 3.7 million views in its first month of publication.
Credited as a Production Assistant, Assistant Editor and for Additional Reporting, my job entailed video editing, transcription and subtitling, manipulation of multimedia, as well as finding and interviewing primary sources.