Trading with the West amongst the best at EIF

Trading with the West

Edinburgh International Festival

19^th August, 2.30pm, Filmhouse, Lothian Rd, Edinburgh

www.eif.co.uk/trading

A panel of business gurus use film clips to discuss the status and future of business relationships between Scotland and Asia.

Michael E Ward, Screenwriter, producer and marketer
Michael Ward was born and raised in India.  A veteran of business and the arts in the West, including producer and co-adaptor of The Far Pavilions stage musical in 2005 and theatrical director in 2007 of Miss Bollywood, starring Shilpa Shetty.  Michael is deeply involved in the UK-India creative corridor and works to build bridges between the two countries, solving problems in order to increase co-operation for mutual commercial benefit.  His first film will be the low budget urban comedy "The Phone Thief" to be shot in Mumbai in October and distributed in India by Fox Star Studios.

Catherine Schenk, Professor of International Economic History, University of Glasgow
Catherine Schenk has written widely on changes in the international economy since 1945.  Most of her research has been on the development of international banking in East Asia and Europe since the 1960s and also on crises in the international monetary system.  Her current project examines the failure to introduce effective international banking supervision.  She has been a visiting researcher at the International Monetary Fund and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and has presented at the Bank for International Settlements, Bank of Japan and at Chatham House.  Her most recent book is entitled International Economic Relations since 1945 (Routledge, 2011).

Zarir J Cama, Group General Manager – Group Management Office, HSBC Holdings PLC

Zarir Cama joined HSBC in 1968, becoming CEO of HSBC India in 1999, the first Indian to hold the position.  In 2002, he became CEO HSBC Bank Malaysia Bhd and in June 2007 set up a new International Division overseeing the Group’s business worldwide.  In 2009 he ran the Group’s Continental European business, before taking up his current role of Group General Manager – Group Management Office.  Zarir was born and educated in India, is on the Committee of the British Malaysian Society and the Royal Society for Asian Affairs and has recently been elected to the Board of Trustees of Asia House.

Ian Ritchie CBE

Ian Ritchie founded Office Workstations Limited (OWL) in Edinburgh in 1984.  OWL became the largest supplier of Hypertext/Hypermedia authoring tools for personal computers and was sold to Matsushita of Japan in 1989.  Ian Ritchie was awarded a CBE in 2003, for services to enterprise and education.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; a Fellow and a past-President of the British Computer Society; Co-Chair of the Scottish Science Advisory Council and was a member of Scotland's Cultural Commission in 2005/2006.  He is Chairman of leading technology companies and advises a number of venture capital firms.

John Callaghan, Former President, Director and CEO pt hero tbk, Indonesia

John Callaghan has a 40 year career in retail, encompassing Canada, South Africa, UK, Ireland, Hong Kong and Malaysia.  For the past four years he has been based in Jakarta, where he held a number of senior positions within major retail companies in the UK and overseas.  He is active in the Globalscot network, assisting Scottish businesses to internationalise and grow.

Michael Groves, Creator and Producer, Moving Conversations

Since completing a PhD in airborne remote sensing, Michael has worked in the UK and internationally in the fields of environmental management, sustainability and corporate communications.  This included three years based in Indonesia, pioneering forest certification throughout south-east Asia.  Since returning to the UK he has advised companies on sustainability strategies and reporting and co-founded a consumer product company that exports to more than 40 countries.  Moving Conversations^® was born from a long standing interest in cinema.  It is now an established format, attracting sponsorship and working with film archives in the UK and internationally.

Moving Conversations^®

“It’s a terrific format”, Sir Michael Grade

Moving Conversations^® is a proven ‘intelligent entertainment’ format where expert panellists choose film and television archive material to shed light on any topic.  Moving Conversations^® have covered a wide range of subjects, including the oil industry, climate change, renewable energy, urban development, fast food, comedy, digital media, journalism, acting, conflict, heritage, banking and television; working with a range of public and private sector sponsors.  Moving Conversations^® have been produced in the UK and Ireland with more planned internationally.

The National Library of Scotland, Scottish Screen Archive

The Scottish Screen Archive is a film and video collection of over 100 years of Scotland's history.  The archive reflects 20th-century Scottish social, cultural and industrial history, the lives of ordinary Scots across the generations and the achievements of Scottish film-makers in the craft of film production.  It houses more than 32,000 items, mostly non-fiction, including documentaries, newsreels, educational material, home movies, television and public information films (including Gaelic broadcasts), industrial material, promotional films and an array of written and printed matter.  The archive was set up in 1976 and has been part of the Collections Department at the National Library of Scotland since 2007.

Cashmere is Scottish....isn't it?

My Moving Conversations show at the Edinburgh International Festival is shaping up well.  All of our panellists have chosen their films from the Scottish Screen Archive - an amusing, amazing and enlightening bunch of movies.  We now await, with eager anticipation, the punchy, controversial arguments from our Bollywood producer, technology investor, banker, retailer and Professor.  The latter is Professor Catherine Schenk, whom has chosen a film called Cashmere is Scottish http://tinyurl.com/3htj4sh, a 1970's promotional film for the cashmere industry.  Catherine has kindly shared some of here thoughts with us on her reasons for choosing this fabulously retro and Joanna Lumley starring film.

The film clip from the 1970s firmly states that Cashmere IS Scottish and this was certainly its reputation and a key part of its value as a luxury product.  It was traditionally a part of Scotland's international brand image (along with bagpipes, shortbread and whisky).  In fact, of course, cashmere was almost always a 'globalised' product that linked Scottish producers and designers with rural Chinese herders who supplied and undertook the first processing of the essential raw material.  In recent years, the production of cashmere has been shifted to China and other countries in East Asia, and the luxury 'brand'  has been somewhat tarnished by variation in quality and fraudulent products.  If cashmere WAS Scottish in the 1970s, it isn't any more - many of the key traditional companies here have been taken over - most notably Pringles.  The ability of Asian companies to produce large amounts of cashmere products for the global market has had an important impact, not only on Scottish business and on consumers, but even more importantly on the environment in China because of the huge expansion of grazing goats.

This leaves the questions:
Was cashmere ever REALLY Scottish or is it an example of long-standing integrated trade links between Scotland and China? 
Does it matter if cashmere is now predominantly 'made in China'?

To see the other films and hear from the other panellists, come along to Trading with the West on 19th August, 2.30pm at Filmhouse, Lothian Rd, Edinburgh.  www.eif.co.uk/trading.