Fridae

Hot on the heels of Fridae.com's highly successful charity showing of Milk in Singapore which raised S$14,000 for community projects, Hong Kong's Chi Heng Foundation is to hold a charity Hong Kong premiere screening of the film on Friday, Feb 13, at the IFC Broadway.

Milk is due for general release in Hong Kong cinemas on Feb 19, and the distributor, Golden Scene, has given five copies of the film to Chi Heng for their exclusive use six days in advance.

Above: Chung To, Chairperson and Founder of the Chi Heng Foundation

Chung To, Chairperson and Founder of the Chi Heng Foundation, said that Broadway Cinemas have leased the charity their entire five houses at their International Finance Centre venue, a total of 530 seats, for simultaneous performances at 7.30 pm on Feb 13. The cost of cinema rental has been covered by an anonymous sponsor, so the proceeds of all the ticket sales will go to the Foundation. After the shows, the KEE Club (a private members club in Wellington Street, Central) will give the whole of one of their floors to sponsor a 70's glamour party; again, thanks to KEE Club's generosity, all ticket proceeds will go to the Foundation (details of where to get your tickets are below).

PR, ticketing, and a host of other issues for the event are being sponsored by Hong Kong's Grebstad Hicks Communications. Paul Hicks, one of the company's directors, and a well known figure on the Hong Kong scene - many will remember him as proprietor of Flex Bar in Glenealy in the '90s - has allowed the Foundation the use of his company's offices and the person of Jasper Cheung, his senior account executive, to set up the event. Jasper said that tickets would go on sale in the early part of the week following Feb 2 at the venues listed below; tickets will not, for commercial reasons, be on sale at IFC Broadway itself.

The Chi Heng Foundation is one of the most active of Hong Kong's NGOs concerned with HIV. Chung To and three others established the foundation in 1998. From an organisation run from home and using their own fax machines, Chi Heng has grown over its ten year life to an organisation with offices in eight major Chinese cities (including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) employing some 30 paid staff. Its headquarters remains in Hong Kong, though the Foundation now works in almost every province of China. Chung To says that Chi Heng's mission is to foster an 'equal, harmonious and healthy society' by programmes supporting equal opportunities (in areas such as sexual orientation, age and religion) and fighting HIV. Its work in the HIV field has developed three main prongs: firstly, educating all parts of society about HIV and sexual orientation, by means of exhibitions, school programmes, public lectures and literature; secondly, affording protection to vulnerable groups, such as gay youths, older men who do not identify as gay but have sex with men, and male sexual workers; and thirdly, care for AIDS orphans. The Foundation's AIDS orphans project takes Chung To and his fellow workers to villages all over China, where they can reach victims directly.

Chung To stresses that their education work is aimed at mainstream society rather than LGBT groups: "Our hope is to raise awareness through public education. We are not just about helping the victims of HIV. Our vision is to educate the majority and create an environment of equality."

Over the last two years, Chi Heng has had rather less prominence in the Hong Kong media than it enjoyed in the past. Due to funding and other difficulties it had to stop running the 'Media Awards for Tongzhi Coverage' in the Chinese printed media, an annual event that it had started back in 1998. For eight years, panels of Hong Kong celebrities were presented with 80-90 extracts from the Hong Kong press and awarded 10 of them prizes for best coverage of LGBT issues. The award was modelled after the Los Angeles's GLAAD (Gay and Lesbians Against Defamation) annual awards, as well as Amnesty International's Human Rights Awards. They attracted big names to act as judges; Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing was a member of the first panel of judges, and Anita Mui was present one year at the awards ceremony. He believes that the awards led to a considerable improvement in the way Hong Kong's Chinese media report LGBT issues and a considerable reduction in the used of the abusive language that used to be a feature here. Cash permitting, the awards will be resurrected soon.

Chi Heng has also been involved in sponsoring gay cinema in Hong Kong. Leslie Cheung was again present when the Foundation premiered Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu at the Hong Kong Convention Centre in 2001. The Foundation co-sponsors the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival which takes place towards the end of each year.

Milk is a particularly appropriate film for Chi Heng to premi�re. Hong Kong-born Chung To was educated in the States and lived for a time in the early seventies in Harvey Milk's San Francisco, so the film recalls for him many personal memories. His experience of gay liberation in California was one of the reasons he abandoned, some years later, his successful career as an investment banker and why he went on to found Chi Heng. With him then were many of the figures, now legendary here, who created the Hong Kong gay and lesbian movement of the '90s. One of these was Chou Wah-shan, author in 2000 of the seminal Tongzhi Politics of Same Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. Chou, away studying in China for many years, is now back in Hong Kong and remains a Director of the Foundation. For his work in the Chi Heng Foundation, Cho Tung was awarded the Raymond Magsaysay Award - considered to be the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize - for Emergent Leadership in 2007.

Chung To believes that Milk is coming to Hong Kong at just the right moment. "The film reminds us", he says, "that the road to equality is a long and hard one and that the steps along that road are the same in every society. Here in Hong Kong people are complacent about their rights and are difficult to push forward. Seeing the film will give those people who want change a sense of identity. The group of people in San Francisco around Harvey Milk, not all of them gay (see Fridae article "Milk's man: Kelvin Yu"), had the vision to change the world to be a more equal place." He hopes that by seeing Milk, young men and women in Hong Kong will be inspired to say with those who have gone before: 'Yes, we can'.

Tickets:
7.30 pm movie IFC Broadway - HK$300
10.00 pm KEE Club Exclusive After Party - H$800 for film and party including 1 hour canap�s and 2 drinks
11.30 pm KEE Club Party - HK$200 including 1 drink
Party theme: '70s Glamour
KEE Club is located at 6/F, 32 Wellington Street, Central

On sale at:
The office of Golden Scene
Tel: (852) 2265 9900
15B Astoria Building, Ashley Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon

The office of Chi Heng Foundation
Tel: (852) 2517 0564
Room B, 11/F, Winbase Centre, 208 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

G.O.D. - Tsim Shai Tsui
Tel: (852) 2784 5555
Shop B02, Basement, Silvercord, 30 Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon

G.O.D. - Central
Tel: (852) 2805 1876
G/F & 1/F, 48 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

G.O.D. - Causeway Bay
Tel: (852) 2890 5555
Sharp Street, East Entrance, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong