Babel Film Workshop’s Filmmaking Initiative Brings Together Hong Kong and US Students Amid Pandemic

HONG
KONG, CHINA – Media OutReach – 27 July 2020 – Over the past five months, students from Hong Kong and New Haven
have been participating in a stay-at-home filmmaking program that guides them
to create short films about their experiences during the pandemic. The
initiative, called Film Stylo, was started by Jeremy Hung, founder of Babel
Film Workshop, amid an arts residency at Yale, and has resulted in an
international archive of student films documenting this historic time.

Jeremy Hung speaking at a welcome reception for Yale-China Arts Fellows at Yale University.
Photo: Emily Chew / Yale-China Association
https://bit.ly/2TWD9bq

In January, Jeremy
arrived at the university for a fellowship administered by the Yale-China
Association and supported by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New
York. Jeremy had begun working with US students to promote arts and cultural
exchange, but school closures in March abruptly cancelled his plans. Under
lockdown at home, Jeremy launched Film Stylo as an online filmmaking initiative
to address students’ emotional wellness and foster intercultural empathy
through filmmaking.

 

Over 200 students
worldwide have since signed up. “Many of our students have produced their best
work as a result,” said Kieran Ryan, Head of Film at King George V School. The
films have been shared with other student filmmakers across the globe. “I feel
like I can relate to others who participated in the initiative,” reflected
Yareli Calderon Romero, a junior at a New Haven Public School. “It made my
experience feel a lot better and less lonely.”

 

Dr. Eunice Yuen, a Child
Psychiatry Fellow at the Yale Child Study Center, has also contributed to the
initiative’s design. “One of our goals is to foster the psychological concept
of mentalization through self-reflection, sharing, and discussion,” Dr. Yuen
said. “Mentalization helps students nourish a healthy sense of self and others
in the world, promoting empathy, diversity, and inclusion in our next
generation of students.”

 

After his fellowship,
Jeremy plans to develop Film Stylo into a global filmmaking platform that
provides visual literacy education and facilitates arts and cultural exchange
between classrooms around the world. “The pandemic has made it clear that
students’ lives today are dominated by technology, so it’s more important than
ever that we teach them to keep sight of what makes us human,” said Jeremy. “As
the world’s most powerful communication medium, filmmaking is the best way of
doing that.”

 

[See the films and sign
up at: www.filmstylo.com]

Babel Film Workshop

Babel Film Workshop
began advocating and advancing visual literacy education for Hong Kong students
in 2018. Since then, it has provided opportunities for hundreds of students to
engage in the most powerful communication medium in the world by teaching film
as a universal language. Its team of filmmakers and educators is dedicated to
promoting film culture as a crucial way to increase our empathy of others. Visit
us at www.babel.com.hk and get our updates on Facebook and Instagram.