AS I read Chi Po-lin’s online biography, the lyrics of “Take My Breath Away” began to echo in my mind.

The theme song of the 1986 American film “Top Gun” is a fitting description of the Taiwanese-born filmmaker’s dramatic career. As an aerial photographer and documentary director, he is used to flying at giddying heights above the ground, usually aboard a helicopter.

Here’s a description of a typical “day at the office” for Chi: “I lean out of the chopper and struggle to find a firm foothold on the landing gear, all the while trying to stay still for better imagery.”

Chi has been performing such stunts for roughly 20 years. Despite the obvious danger, he relishes his work, he explained at a recent forum held at Fudan University’s School of Management.

Prior to his leap into documentary production, this former Taiwan civil servant had made a name of himself as a part-time aerial photographer. He earned celebrity status with the award-winning documentary “Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above.” The 93-minute film was shot over the course of three years and named best documentary during the 2013 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, one of the largest and most influential film festivals in the Chinese-speaking world.

Unlike many documentary directors who keep a distance from their subjects for the sake of objectivity, Chi has a clear agenda, which is environmental protection.

Dedication to the environmental cause has sustained him from the very outset of his photographic career. His works are as much a paean to Taiwan’s natural beauty as a matter-of-fact portrayal of how this beauty has been blemished by human excesses.

Aside from capturing the island’s picturesque attractions like Ali Mountain and Sun Moon Lake, Chi’s lens doesn’t turn away from far uglier sights like polluted seashores, rivers turned orange by industrial waste, chemical factories in the midst of rice paddies, and mountains grotesquely disfigured after years of granite quarrying and timber harvesting.

To make his point about the dangers of ecological degradations, Chi has held numerous public talks and photo exhibitions. One such exhibition garnered 800,000 visits. Unfortunately, most of the visitors appeared “indifferent” to the issues he tried to highlight, such as climate change and rising sea levels.

Although Chi displayed an adventurous spirit from an early age, he chose to become a civil servant, partly to please his father. But a nine-to-five desk job was never what he wanted, and before long Chi found himself off the beaten path. Part-time employment with the Taiwan expressway engineering authorities enabled him to take aerial photographs and in the meantime make some money to pay for his expensive helicopter trips.

“Perhaps my name is a hint that I’m destined for a career related to aviation,” Chi quipped, explaining that his name bears a phonetic resemblance to that of the German baron Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin (1838-1917), inventor of the first airship.

Watershed moment

The watershed moment that marked his shift from aerial photography to documentary filmmaking came in August 2009, when he witnessed firsthand the havoc Typhoon Morakot wrought on his beloved Taiwan.

Three days after August 8, the day Morakot rampaged through the island of 23 million, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, Chi hopped on the chopper again. He had taken the journey many times before, but this time it was meant to be different. He was part of the crew responsible for assessing the damage.

What he saw deeply struck him. Torn roads, felled trees, debris and wreckage of settlements destroyed by mud slides. In southern Taiwan, the “hellish” sight of countless dead trees clogging the estuary of Kaoping River, the largest river in southern Taiwan, had a profound effect on him. With the helicopter buffeted by heavy rain and gales, “beads of water trickled down my cheeks, and I couldn’t tell if they were tears or raindrops,” said Chi.

Amid so much bleakness came the realization that traditional static pictures could only do so much to convey the gravity of the situation.

That’s when the idea first came to him, to make an aerial documentary about Taiwan, he explained.

This, however, proved much trickier than first expected, both technically and financially. Aerial images recorded on conventional video cameras tend to be shaky and blurry, and at that time there were no commercially-available drones. Chi had to look overseas for the right equipment.

He found a US-made micro-camera which could be attached to the front of the chopper. It was also capable of producing smooth, high-quality video images. But priced at US$700,000 (or about NT$30 million based on the then exchange rate), this piece of kit far exceeded his budget. “My civil servant salary was NT$50,000 a month, and most people with NT$30 million at their disposal would spend it on a house or overseas travel,” Chi noted.

Besides financial prudence, another argument against making the expensive purchase was that Chi, then aged 47, would retire in three years. His friends advised him to delay his filmmaking plans until he could execute them in the ease and comfort of retirement, said Chi. He eventually decided against postponement, and not simply because of money. “I feared my failing eyesight and physical condition would get the better of me when I retired,” said Chi. He paid for the camera and other expenses with help from friends, as well as bank loans secured with his own house as collateral.

He spent a year drumming up financial support for his documentary, which had an investment of NT$90 million, the highest ever of this genre in Taiwan. After the money was there, Chi headed a full-time film crew, and then condensed 300 hours’ worth of video into approximately 90 minutes. Within half a year of its premier, the documentary won its Golden Horse accolades. It also earned an estimated NT$200 million at the box-office, a record for a documentary in Taiwan.

Compared to commercial success, Chi said it was the documentary’s social impact that satisfied him more.

“In the past, a majority of Taiwan residents chose to be blind to the “ugly sights” depicted in “Beyond Beauty,” as if they didn’t exist,” said Chi.

The politics of patronage and a lack of accountability also meant that many local politicians would rather remain silent to avoid potentially messy clean-up efforts. But they were jolted out of complacency by the bombshell “Beyond Beauty” dropped, according to Chi.

Misplaced fears

A good documentary from a passionate creator can keep local authorities on their toes. Chi told of an environmental official who complained in jest that he dared not go home, for fear of encountering crowds of protesters.

Since “Beyond Beauty” threatened the interests of, among others, unscrupulous quarry operators and factory owners, fears about reprisal stalked Chi’s family for a period.

Such fears turned out to be misplaced. Instead, an outpouring of popular anger at official connivance of ecological degradations triggered a succession of law enforcement actions against offenders. Although embarrassed by shots of a river within its jurisdiction that had turned orange, the city government of Kao-hsiung moved quickly to punish the culprit, a sub-contractor of Apple found to be discharging unprocessed waste into the river. As a result, the plant was shuttered. This, according to Chi, delayed the release of the iPhone 6 by six months. “This testifies to the power of documentary,” Chi added.

Right now he is working on a sequel to “Beyond Beauty.” Chi’s follow-up film will continue his interest in the environment, and focus on the transnational nature of pollution.

For instance, garbage from Taiwan flows with ocean currents and ends up somewhere else; while smog from the northern part of China’s mainland also affects certain other regions.

“These are issues that we should face and resolve together,” Chi argued.