Life.Culture.Discovery.

The lessons of Cloud Atlas movie starring Tom Hanks for indoor-farming pioneer in Hong Kong

Raymond Mak credits the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s multi-narrative story for his resignation from PwC to start his own business, indoor farm Farmacy HK

He points to a character who keeps challenging authority, and says: ‘When you try and search for truth, all sorts of things will change’

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Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas (2012).

CREDIT: Warner Bros

Published: 4:45pm, 2 Mar 2022

Cloud Atlas (2012), directed by Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, is a meditation on the consequences of human actions, told through six stories set in periods of the past, present and future that connect with each other in unpredictable ways. Based on David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, it stars an ensemble cast that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant, who each play multiple roles.

Raymond Mak Ka-chun, co-founder and CEO of Hong Kong mobile indoor urban farming start-up Farmacy HK, who is also a former Legislative Council candidate, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.

I saw the film in the cinema in 2012. I was invited by a friend who appears to know me quite well, who told me, “You’ll like this movie.” I must thank that friend: it was very inspirational for me. She didn’t expect it to be something that would be so fundamental for me afterwards, but it was.

I was about to get promoted to another level of my professional career (as a consultant at accounting firm PwC), and I was about to turn 30 years old. At that time I was looking for some answers to my life questions: is this the way I want to go? Is there some purpose in my life beyond my career? This movie came along at the right time.

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in Cloud Atlas. Photo: Warner Bros

There’s a statement that touched my heart and that is still a fundamental message for me. Adam (Ewing, the protagonist of the film’s earliest story, set in 1849, an American lawyer who becomes an abolitionist after witnessing the horrors of slavery) explains to his father-in-law why he was doing something that wasn’t seen as normal in that era, and he says (in response to his father-in-law’s assertion that “No matter what you do, it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in a limitless ocean”), “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”