City of Gastronomy
Occasionally a project involves an entire city, with all its representatives, organisations, stakeholders, interest groups and individual citizens, all with their competing objectives and priorities. In this case, the project was part of a bid for Kuching city to join the UNESCO Creative Cities Network under the banner of gastronomy, alongside 37 other cities in a global network aimed at achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals through the growth of the creative economy.
With a 20,000-word report already in production and a UNESCO mandated application form pending, the city was permitted to submit one further link to seal the success of its bid. The obvious solution was a short film, the emotive heart to complement the rational mind of the written report.
This video had three purposes to fulfil:
to present Kuching city as a comprehensible and creative destination;
to demonstrate the fit between Kuching’s gastronomic sector and the criteria for a creative city in the network; and, most importantly,
to make the UNESCO panel feel an immediate connection with a food culture that they might never have previously encountered.
All this needed to be achieved in under 7 minutes and in the midst of a global pandemic. Creativity had to meet professionalism and purpose.
The project began with a tight timeline and a tight budget. The application deadline was fixed by UNESCO at midnight on 30 June 2021. Spearheaded by two NGOs, the Culinary Heritage and Arts Society Sarawak and the Atelier Society under the banner of the local municipality, the process was one of reconciliation, combining the aims and outcomes of public and private partnership, of economy and society, of both affluent and marginalised communities. Both process and product had to represent multiple stakeholders to a global audience.
FilmCo itself was also on a cusp, looking to establish itself beyond a core group by taking a role more towards creative agency than discrete video production house. This project, with its far-reaching focus on boosting the creative economy, seemed a good place to start. So, FilmCo took its client-led concept, featuring many of the stakeholders as on-screen talent, and its own proven production skills into a newly formed team with M Studios for on set creative input. FilmCo’s resident cinematographer, Ah Lam, would be behind the lens to maintain a FilmCo eye on the proceedings.
The result was a truly plural product – a representation of the UCCN’s criteria as well as its ethos.
