New Zealander takes film awards

Press, 9 July 1986, Page 44

New Zealander takes film awards

NZPA staff correspondent Hong Kong

A Hong Kong film company headed by a New Zealander has picked up top honours in both the British and United States leading industrial film awards.

Hawke Films, run by Mr Keith Hawke, won the Grand Prix in the British Industrial and Scientific Film Association Gold Awards in London.

It also won its category of Sales and Service, having picked up two awards in two categories out of eight in the Craft Awards before the finals for Film Editing and Cinematography.

In addition, its entry, “From Hong Kong To The World,” collected a Gold Camera Award from the United States Industrial Film Festival in its category.

“We scooped the pool,” said Mr Hawke, a former Christchurch television cameraman.

The two associations’ awards are the industrial film equivalents of Oscars.

Mr Hawke said he believed the film’s musical score, by two other New Zealanders now based in Hong Kong, Messrs Andrew Hagen and Morton Wilson of Schtung Music, should also have won an award. The United States festival — the industry’s leading showcase for honouring non-theatrical productions — attracted more than 1000 entries from 22 countries, and the British awards drew 363 programmes.

The Hawke Films entry was an eight-minute film of pictures and music commissioned by Cathay Pacific Airways for use in marketing.

“The film, which has no narration, relies on music and visual images of planes and their destinations to capture the audience attention," said Mr Hawke, who, set up his documentary company eight year's ago. The Otago-born filmmaker left New Zealand in 1968 and freelanced in Singapore, Malaysia and

Thailand and covered the Vietnam war.

Mr Hawke then spent several years in Australia, returning to New Zealand in 1972 to work as a freelance director and cameraman.

Among the films he worked on were “Never Go Near Him,” a documentary of the 1975 New Zealand-Himalaya expedition which necessitated a crash course in mountain climbing to keep up with 300 porters and mountaineers while filming at the same time.

In 1979 Mr Hawke went to Hong Kong and spent two years with a local company before setting up his own company.

He got his first big break with the commissioning of a documentary on the five-year construction of the Hong Kong Bank’s controversial new head office — said to be the most expensive building in the world with a cost estimated at SHK6 billion (about $1.4 billion).