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Uncle Umbrella

Laurie McDonald

1997 00:16:09 United States, Hong Kong SAR ChinaEnglishColorStereo4:3Hi8 video
Tags:
Consumer culture

Description

They called him Umbrella Boy when he started his business. After repairing umbrellas on the same city block for over fifty years, he became Uncle Umbrella, a man who earned the respect and affection of his neighbors and customers.

Hong Kong is a throw-away society. When it rains, umbrellas are discarded everywhere, and some of them are not even broken. Hong Kong is also a society that conserves, stubbornly holding on to values seemingly incongruous to its modern façade. In a land where new umbrellas from department stores often cost less than a repair job, Uncle Umbrella is at once an anachronism in a culture of consumption and an embodiment of Hong Kong’s amazing ability to assimilate the new with the old. In the humble act of tinkering with torn fabric and rusted metal, Uncle Umbrella and his customers are partners in a quest for that fabled province where past and present, East and West converge.

Uncle Umbrella was filmed during the reunification of Hong Kong and mainland China, on July 1, 1997.

With Sam Ho.

About Laurie McDonald

Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow). 

As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées. 

Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.