User:CYang2021

Chester Yang is a British Filmmaker born in Mange, a small village of about four thousand people in the North of Sierra Leone in 1970. Chester’s father is Taiwanese and his mother is half Sierra Leonean and half Lebanese. Chester never met his father as his father was then kicked out of the country when Sierra Leone made the transition from a multi-party system, just after independence from Britain in 1961, to a dictatorship in the late 60s. Chester grew up in Freetown, the capital city, facing all the odds as the country deteriorated, socially, economically and politically and descended into a brutal civil war. His dream was to study architecture but after college, he found out that there is no university in Sierra Leone or any of his neighbouring countries that offers architecture. While in school Chester performed in plays as an actor, so, in 1992, he joined an activist theatre group called Tabule Theatre during a time when all theatres, the TV station and most media was dismantled by the government. The performing hall was seized and the war started to spread across the country. Eventually, they became a formidable group, advocating for peace, democracy, justice, development and equality. In 1993, when the military took over, they brought back TV. The group then, Tambale Production, which formed after having been kicked out of Tabule Theatre by the old members for taking the group to the grassroots and turning it into an activist theatre, was hired to make shows for the new TV station.

Chester then got involved as a writer, producer, actor and assistant director. In 1996 as the war spread like wildfire and after witnessing the horrors and aftermath of war, Chester became disillusioned about life and due to work and political stance, he became a target. Some of his friends got captured, jailed and some died in the war. Chester had no choice but to flee Sierra Leone to the UK as a student.

While living in London and studying marketing, Chester began to search for democracy as he never experienced it. Chester could not find it in education, at work or in the street. All he saw on TV were debates and politicians giving speeches and people going to the polls every four years but most things remained the same. So when, in 2003, over two million people took to the streets to demonstrate against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he took to the streets of London with a handheld camera to capture democracy in action. Chester was really disappointed when Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister and parliament, took the nation and the world to war in the Middle East. Since then, Chester’s search for true democracy started.

Due to the rise of digital filmmaking and the access he had to equipment, Chester set to start making short dramatic films with the help of his friends. In 2005, Chester went to study fiction directing at the National Film and Television school. Just after graduating and planning to make his first feature film, the financial crisis of 2008 struck the nation and all the protests and riots started. Many media professionals lost their jobs and occupied the independent scene he was getting into. Opportunities for an ethnic minority coming from Africa like Chester, who wants to make radical films stood no chance in getting into the club. So, armed with a camera and a microphone, he took to the street again to find democracy but what Chester witnessed and captured in the brutality between the police and protesters and the arrogance and dictatorship of politicians shocked him. Chester filmed and followed the anti-war movement for 10 years since 2003, the student uprising from 2010 to 2014 and then recently the privatisation of schools from 2017 to 2020.

In 2011, Chester formed CY Film Productions and from the footage, he had recorded over the years, he created War Matters (2013), Kettling of the Voices (2015) and now completing The Great Schools Robbery about the undemocratic way the government is taking education away from local communities, privatising it and centralising it. During this time, Chester went back to Sierra Leone to film what was going on after the civil war and made The Fight Against Ebola (2015), Sierra Leone's Disgruntled Youths (2017) and Cycling Nomads (2018) while developing four feature films and two TV series. Against all odds and with the heartbreaking marginalisation he faced in getting funding and help from the mainstream media as well as bullying, he managed to get his films to several film festivals across the world, compete with filmmakers with money and privilege, win awards, get his films broadcasted in the UK and internationally and streamed on various VOD platforms in the UK and around the world.

Chester’s next journey has now begun and is working towards making his first dramatic feature film, Escape from the Last World, a film that looks at the demise of the human race. Chester hopes to bring everything he has learnt about real-life into dramatic entertainment from his own artistic point of view, how he sees the world and to predict what could happen to humanity if we continue in this path in our human, political, social and economic history. Chester quotes “The reason I as born”.