After 30-year search, Canadian journalist Arthur Kent finally tracks down the Hong Kong student activist he filmed during Tiananmen Square crackdown
- Kent, a freelancer working in Beijing during the protests, reconnected with Kenneth Lam, whom he had lost sight of after the square was cleared
- Lam appears with Beijing student activist Cheng Zhen in a scene in Kent’s film, Black Night in June, containing newly restored footage
When Canadian journalist Arthur Kent filmed two student protesters on the steps of a monument in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, at about 3am on June 4, 1989, he had no idea who they were.
He never found out what became of them after a bloody crackdown by the People’s Liberation Army swept the area, and had spent the past three decades trying to track them down.
Last week, Kent, who captured other scenes of the event on film, finally got hold of one of the two protesters, whom he described as a “young couple” in footage he shot. He has put the newly restored images into a new film that recounts the protests and clampdown.
Kenneth Lam, a Hong Kong student leader who took tents and funds to Beijing in May 1989 in support of protesters, told the South China Morning Post he was certain the 13-minute film’s release would help refresh people’s memories of the suppression.
Lam and Cheng Zhen, a Beijing student leader at the time, were filmed sitting on the steps of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, an obelisk in the centre of the square, for what would become Kent’s film, Black Night in June, when People’s Liberation Army troops stormed the area.
