The making of a documentary with Eastbourne's Chinese community

By Domenico Trillo

Photo from WRVS Heritage Plus archive

During the autumn of 2009 film maker Tom Hillenbrand and WRVS Heritage co-ordinator Hamish MacGillivray worked with students and elders from the Eastbourne District Chinese Community Association to discover the origins of the Chinese community in Eastbourne.

The project started as an animation workshop then developed into a video scrapbook using oral history, animating old adverts, and excerpts from Mick Hyman’s collection of unseen home movies of Hong Kong and Eastbourne.

Clues about the first Chinese restaurants were discovered at Eastbourne Library. The library has old tourism brochures and Eastbourne Herald newspapers that show adverts of Chinese run restaurants from the 1950s.

At the time of writing the film is being edited by Tom and is called “Beautiful Chinese Place” after an Eastbourne Herald article written in 1970 describing the new Chinese take-aways appearing in Eastbourne.

A special free public screening will take place on Sunday 25 April from 2.30pm at Parkland Junior School near Hampden Park,  Eastbourne, BN22 9QJ. All are welcome, please tell Hamish if you want to attend.

For more details contact Hamish on heritageplusbmeEastbourne

@wrvs.org.uk or call 07786-866-505.

Newspaper adverts reproduced by kind permission of Sussex Newspapers and the British Library.