Cunning Boy. Jai Gou. Ngau Ngau. Big Head Boy. Young Joe. Amy.
Photography by Jessica Turner
When Lake Highlands neighbor and filmmaker Luis Arturo Tapia first arrived on Lantau Island, these names didn’t mean much to him. Close to six years later, he knows their favorite foods, pet peeves and individual eccentricities.
They’re part of a herd of water buffalo on Lantau, the largest of Hong Kong’s 263 islands. Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated places on the planet, has long suffered from housing shortages, with an August report from the Hong Kong Housing Authority revealing an average wait for public housing of 5.4 years.
It’s against this backdrop Tapia shoots his latest project, a documentary film entitled Mother of Buffalo. As demand for land and housing soars, development has crept into Lantau Island, threatening the herd’s home. The film follows the buffalo and their guardian, Jean Leung, a local property owner who has become an unyielding champion in a fight against encroachment.
Tapia, 46, was born in Mexico City to a Mexican father and a Texan mother. At five years old, the family moved back to his mother’s hometown of Dallas, where he went on to attend the Greenhill School for most of his education. Film was already an interest, with Tapia remembering a mockumentary he made as a senior project as his first experience with an audience.
However, he didn’t see it as a career early on. While completing a degree in East Asian Studies at Princeton University, Tapia interned for a financial firm in Shanghai and a mission specializing in migrant worker outreach in Taiwan. After graduating, he moved to Shanghai and taught English for a while before consulting for industrial firms around China. Filmmaking had remained an interest, so Tapia wrote a script based on his experiences. He eventually used that script to launch a career in filmmaking in China that has seen him shoot corporate campaigns for Alibaba, the NBA, Disney, Toyota and Yves Saint Laurent.
He called Shanghai home for close to 20 years before moving to Hong Kong in 2020. Since moving back to the United States in 2022, Tapia has lived in Lake Highlands with his wife, Xiaoli, and three children.
Tapia was recently awarded the North Texas Pioneer Award by the Austin Film Society to finish shooting Mother of Buffalo. To learn more about the film and what the grant means for him, we sat down with Tapia. Here’s what he had to say.
You moved to Lantau in 2020. How did you come across the buffalo?
They’re treasured members of the community. They’re really unique, but there was this one lady who looked after them. She decided that she wanted to look after them and I kept seeing her. I would see her sometimes on the beach, sometimes on the side of a mountain or in the wetland, always surrounded by these buffalo. And I was like, ‘Who is this lady?’ It’s incredible. It’s like, I can’t help myself. Literally, on one jog as I was going up the hill to my house, I almost ran into her. And so I was like, ‘OK, the universe is really talking to me. I gotta say something.’ So I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve seen you around. Would you mind if I follow you around with a camera for a day or two?’ And she thought I was a real weirdo. But she’s like, ‘Yeah, OK, no problem,’ and really friendly.
When did you realize you had a story?
The next day, I’m in the car with her, seeing what she’s doing. I thought maybe I’d film her for a couple days, I’d have some interesting footage and I’d cut it together as a little personal two-minute video. But then the more time I spent with her, and as I started to try to understand where the buffalo came from, and kind of what their situation is now, I really felt that it was a really deep story there. Not just the site, of course, the beautiful story of this fascinating woman, her connection to these animals, but also to understand they’re threatened. Their habitat is disappearing. There’s the potential for massive transformation of that island. They’re directly in the crosshairs of that.
Do you feel like you’ve learned anything from the last five years?
More than anything, I just fell in love with her and the animals. It taught me a lot. I went from fearing them to loving them. I just saw them in a totally different light, in the sense that I saw them as these kind of anonymous, beautiful creatures. But they’re alive like us and they have personalities. They each have favorite foods, and so that was like, ‘Wow. I have to tell that.’ And to watch her care for them every day. She’s in her 70s, and she does this every single day, and it’s really hard. She doesn’t do it for money.
How important is a grant like this for you?
It’s huge. It’s so hard to do independent film and it’s hard to have the money and time. I put so much time into this. I’m honored by the recognition. It’s an incredible group of filmmakers. Richard Linklater started the Austin Film Study. There’s another guy that’s an absolute hero of mine. It’s nice to be seen.
What do you want audiences to take away?
I just hope they see the beautiful thing that I saw. Yeah, that’s it. It’s really that simple. And I hope that just because I learned something, I hope that they learned something new and interesting. It’s that simple something: learn something new and interesting.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
