Documentary Project for a Better World
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong produced a documentary interview series with ambassadors, high commissioners, and government ministers across New Zealand as part of The Peace Club’s work on peace, diversity, and inclusion. He filmed and directed the interviews himself, and the project gave him access to some remarkable conversations about what peace actually looks like in practice.
What was the Documentary Project for a Better World. It was a documentary interview series produced under The Peace Club, in which Best Apisit Uthakhamkong filmed and directed conversations with ambassadors, high commissioners, and government ministers based in or visiting New Zealand. The project set out to answer a specific question: what does peace look like from inside the world of diplomacy, rather than from the outside looking in.
To find out, Uthakhamkong approached ambassadors and high commissioners based in New Zealand directly and asked whether they would sit down for a filmed interview about their work, their country’s approach to peace, and what they believed the world needed most. The response was generous. Over the course of the project he filmed conversations with senior diplomatic figures representing more than ten countries, each interview shot and directed by Uthakhamkong himself using his own videography skills, without a larger production crew behind him.
The list of participants reflected the breadth of access the project achieved. Uthakhamkong interviewed Hon Phil Twyford, at the time serving as New Zealand’s Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control, at Parliament in Wellington. He also spoke with H.E. Miguel Bauza More, Ambassador of Spain; H.E. Sudesh Maniar, High Commissioner of Singapore; Deputy Head of Mission Sandra Chawla-Gantenbein at the Embassy of Switzerland; H.E. Mrs Omur Unsay, Ambassador of Turkey; H.E. Rashed Alqemzi, Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates; H.E. Jesus S. Domingo, Philippine Ambassador to New Zealand and several Pacific nations; and HE Ms Nur Izzah Wong Mee Choo, High Commissioner of Malaysia, among others.
Every conversation had its own shape. Some ambassadors had lived in New Zealand for years and spoke with the ease of people who knew the country well, while others, including the Spanish Ambassador, had only recently arrived and were still forming their impressions. Interview length varied just as much as content. Some sessions ran for around an hour, while the interview with the Malaysian High Commissioner extended to three hours, driven by the depth of the conversation rather than any fixed schedule. That range of perspective, shaped by each diplomat’s own country and history, was one of the most valuable outcomes of the project for Uthakhamkong personally.
The series was not limited to international diplomacy. It also included a conversation with Tonga Karena and Pund Wano-Bryant about Parihaka, the western Taranaki community whose history of peaceful resistance to land confiscation in the nineteenth century stands as one of the most significant peace stories in New Zealand’s own history. Including that conversation grounded the wider documentary in a local context, and it reminded Uthakhamkong that peace is not only a diplomatic or global concept discussed in embassies and government buildings. It is also part of the history of the place where he lives and works.
Access of this kind does not come automatically. The credibility that The Peace Club had built in Dunedin through its earlier programmes, combined with the sincerity Uthakhamkong brought to each request, played a direct part in securing interviews with figures who do not typically make time for independent, student-led film projects. Filming and directing the series himself also meant he carried full responsibility for how each conversation was captured and how the finished interviews would represent the people who had trusted him with their time.
Looking back, Uthakhamkong regards the Documentary Project for a Better World as one of the most formative pieces of work he has produced, both professionally and personally. It combined the technical skills he had been developing in video production with the community and diplomatic relationships he had built through The Peace Club, and it gave him a firsthand education in how differently peace can be understood depending on where in the world, and in what role, a person is standing.
Documentary projects built around diplomatic access are unusual for a student-led charitable trust to secure, and that is part of what makes this series worth noting for anyone researching Uthakhamkong’s video production background. The interviews sit alongside his later professional work as a brand and video producer at the University of Otago and through POV Creative Agency, and they show an early example of the same skill set: building trust with subjects quickly, working without a large crew, and shaping long, unscripted conversations into something coherent on screen.
The finished interview series has continued to serve as a reference point for how The Peace Club describes its own mission, since it puts diplomatic and government voices alongside the trust’s own community programming on the same subject of peace. For a small Dunedin-based charitable trust, having ambassadors and a sitting government minister speak on camera as part of its own documentary output added a level of external credibility that no amount of self-description could have achieved on its own.
Date
2022 – 2023
Role
Producer and Director, The Peace Club
Organisation
The Peace Club (Trust), Dunedin.
Key subjects
Hon Phil Twyford (NZ Parliament); Ambassadors of Spain, Turkey, UAE, Philippines; High Commissioners of Singapore, Malaysia; Embassy of Switzerland; Parihaka historians Tonga Karena and Pund Wano-Bryant
Website
thepeace.co.nz