Exactly a week ago, me and munz decided to take up an offer by Canon Marketing Malaysia to attend an event for photographers where Simon Yam (yup, Canon’s ambassador) would be there in person for a quick question and answer session with everyone as well as provide a couple of photo opportunities for the attendees. This was then followed with a free movie screening of “Echoes of the Rainbow” which helped Simon win the award for Best Actor in the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards.

The event was held in Pavillion, so by the time me and munz battled through the Monday evening traffic, we arrived there slightly late where we saw Simon entering the Gold Class Lounge at GSC Pavillion. There he was speaking to a couple of reporters while a huge crowd of 200+ photographers filled up the main hallway before entering the cinema.

Whilst the rest were waiting at the main area where Simon would be speaking, I tried to enter into the Gold Class Lounge but didn’t manage to get past the guards!

So I decided to take a couple of shots of the folks I know who was there.

Yup that is camera shy Xavier in the photo above

A shot of Jason, he tried to get me into the Gold Class Lounge to get up close to Simon but the guards wouldn’t let me

Jason and Mun Tzin

Once Simon left the Gold Class lounge, I managed to sneak in near the door to capture a couple of shots.

By the time he arrived at the main hall, there were so many photographers there that I could hardly get a glimpse of him so I ended up chatting with Jason. Most of the time I didn’t know what he said because he was answering questions in Mandarin as well as Cantonese, so me being a “banana“, I was just “lepaking” in front of the air con vent because it was getting a little hot in the hallway.

I even took a couple of shots of the people surrounding him trying to get photos of Simon.

After he has completed his Q&A session and adjourned out, everyone was ushered into the cinema to catch the show where they even provided free popcorn and a tin of coke. Not too shabby at all.

Overall I thought the movie was actually quite good. It was a proper serious type of show which depicted life in Hong Kong in the late 60′s for a shoemaker and trying to make ends meet to send his two sons to school. The movie talks about how the sons went through life, private school (yes, the parents worked very hard to pay for their school tuition), bribing police officers with moon cakes and facing harassment all around.

My rating for the show is a good 3.5/5 stars!

p.s. Check out Jason’s blog post as well with his up close and personal shots with Simon.