FFCC chair Hans Morgenstern spoke with Miami-raised and educated filmmaker Andrew Hevia (a producer of the Oscar-winning Moonlight) about his new documentary Leave The Bus Through The Broken Window. Here’s what Hevia had to say about the challenge of immersing himself in the Hong Kong art scene while knowing little about the language and culture yet still coming up with a profound documentary about art.

“There’s no way I would have won the grant if I had proposed the movie that I have,” filmmaker Andrew Hevia says by phone while discussing his new documentary, Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window. He’s hanging out on a balcony during a break from some Los Angeles event that makes for a noisy background. The Miami-educated filmmaker is working for Pablo Larraín as vice president of TV and film at the Chilean filmmaker’s U.S. office. Hevia will be in Miami this month for special screenings of his Fulbright-sponsored documentary. In November, he’ll attend the 11th iteration of the Borscht Film Festival, the homegrown film fest he cofounded while still in high school.

It’s been a long journey for the filmmaker. Before he won an Oscar for producing Moonlight, Hevia, a graduate of New World School of Arts in Miami, took on a project funded by a Fulbright Student Research grant to make a documentary about art in Hong Kong. He proposed it as a kind of sequel to an earlier documentary he’d directed for WLRN, Rising Tide, which focused on Miami’s flourishing art scene in the shadow of Art Basel Miami Beach. This time, he would examine Basel’s nascent Hong Kong fair and how it related to that major metropolitan city’s artists. Hevia did not anticipate how out-of-his-element he would be.

The problems began early. As Moonlight’s production was pushed forward, so was Hevia’s move to Hong Kong to prepare for the art fair’s opening in mid-March 2016. He was hoping for time to immerse himself in the art scene and make connections with studios, artists, and collectors who could offer insight into the changing dynamics Basel might bring to the city’s art scene, much like what he’d observed in 2002 when the art fair arrived in Miami Beach. “I was supposed to get to Hong Kong in September, and then I would have had something like five months to do my research, but… I got to Hong Kong in December and didn’t have time to do the research, so then I don’t know who are my experts. In Miami, I had over 20 years of lived experience…”

(Read the rest in Miami New Times and more on Independent Ethos)