The Pendulum Always Returns to Centre

https://youtu.be/VHnWDt7PxlI?si=PXQoYO6snQB6u3p9

This past Saturday night, 18 July, more than 350 people watched "Pendulum Control" together, live, with me answering questions in the chat throughout. For one hour, a private struggle became a shared one, and that is the only measure of success I have ever really cared about.

This is my first major documentary, and its YouTube premiere follows the film winning the Extreme Sports Award at the Paladino d'Oro Sport Film Festival in Palermo - Italy, the first Hong Kong production ever honoured there. A small sign that a deeply personal story can still reach a world stage.

Forty Years in the Making

Early next year marks forty years since the accident that changed the course of my life. "Pendulum Control" is one chapter in a longer argument I have been making with my own body, and the world, ever since: that limitation is a starting condition, not a verdict.

There was a 3,000 kilometre ride from Beijing to Mohe. There was ATIR, the Around the Island Race, where I formed half of the first fully disabled doubles crew to finish it unaided; my crewmate's father, a filmmaker, quietly documented that journey, and it will finally be released this coming November or December. There was a 2525 kilometre ride from the Baltics to the Arctic Circle and down into Oslo, and from Cambodia into Thailand. And then there was the sky: training in South Africa to become the first adaptive paragliding pilot in Asia and Africa, the journey "Pendulum Control" now records.

Hong Kong broadcasters also made short films about the fight to open a major local marathon to wheelchair participants, and about my life more broadly, and I made short films of my own around training for my scuba diving licences. Each project, in its own way, rested on the same belief: that showing what is possible matters more than any single achievement on its own.

A Story Built by Many Hands

"Pendulum Control" carries my name, but it was never made by me alone. A director followed an unfinished story with patience. The same director behind the camera spent countless hours capturing what most would never think to film. An editor found the shape of a story inside hundreds of hours of footage. An instructor taught a student he had never trained for before and trusted the process alongside me. A paragliding community in South Africa opened its doors to someone they had no reason to expect would succeed. A wider crew handled the logistics and unglamorous details that hold a film together, and friends and family showed up again and again, simply because they believed the story was worth telling.

So when 350 people spent that Saturday evening watching this film, the success belonged to all of them too.

An Invitation

Almost forty years ago, I lost the ability to walk. I did not lose the ability to move things, including, it turns out, 350 strangers willing to spend a Saturday night asking questions about oscillation, control, and learning to trust the wind again.

Now I want to widen that room. "Pendulum Control" was never meant to stay within one city. If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs to see it, host a screening, or tell a journalist or fellow advocate about it. Every share is another pendulum finding its way toward centre, somewhere I could never reach alone.

Thank you to everyone, near and far, who helped bring this story to life and helped it travel. If you feel the pull to join in, the door is open.

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