The Dispute
Fredie CHAN Ho-lun
Release year: 2022
Run time: 34 minutes
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Shortly after moving from Hong Kong to Edinburgh and settling into his student flat, filmmaker Fredie Chan discovers a clash among locals and overseas students over the massive housing shortage in Edinburgh. Developers are converting empty lots and unused old buildings into new housing stocks for international students rather than the locals. Through an empathetic and personal documentary lens, Chan befriends 91-year-old Harry, a long-time resident and community councillor, and follows a group of grassroots housing advocates in order to understand the clash and today’s global housing crisis.
Director biography
Born in Hong Kong, Fredie Chan is a documentary filmmaker and teacher. He has been appointed as Part Time Lecturer by HKU MA Literary and Cultural Studies Program to teach a course on Participatory Media and Cultural Studies in 2024. Received Andrew Grant PG Scholarship to study MA Film-Directing at the University of Edinburgh in 2021, and he began to be involved in Living Rent, a Scottish Tenants Union, to advocated housing justice. The movement inspired him to make his first award winning British documentary film “The Dispute” in the UK which connects with nation-wide grassroots community movement. The Dispute won the Best Director’s Award in Cyprus Archeological, Ethnographic and Historical Documentary Film Festival 2023.
As a socially-engaged artist and teacher, equality of opportunity, dignity, and respect are fundamental rights for all people, he preserves these rights and empathy as his first principle in filmmaking. He started curating “Grassroots Filmmaking Project” and “ Grassroots Video Arts Festival” from 2013 to 2018, plus his full time Film and Video Arts work, he has nurtured more than 600 amateur filmmakers.