My Dad, The Healer

Hello. I'm Shan Shan Tam. I’m making a documentary about my father Tom Tam and his healing system called Tong Ren. 

ABOUT ME

I’m an award-winning filmmaker from Boston, now based in Palm Beach and NYC. I began my career working at PBS and on celebrated shows such as Top Chef, America’s Test Kitchen, Lidia Bastianich Celebrates America, Weekends with Yankee, ESPN’s NYC Marathon, and Boston Trauma. 

In 2020, I co-founded This Little Company, a full-service media and production company with a client list including Tribeca Film, Tommy Hilfiger, Viacom, GLAAD, Cartier, IMG, NBC Universal, and the Human Rights Campaign. We just got back from a successful SXSW premiere of my most recent film “The Dads.” It’s been a busy year with another recent film “Team Dream,” winning Audience Choice and Best Documentary awards at multiple film festivals. And now I am ready to take on my biggest challenge yet – a documentary about my dad and Tong Ren Healing. 

ABOUT THE FILM 

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve watched my parents heal people with acupuncture. With research and trials, my dad started developing his own system of healing. Acupuncture uses needles to manipulate the body’s chi to heal itself. The basis of Tong Ren is similarly to manipulate the body’s chi, or more so the body’s bio-electricity. But Tong Ren does so with brainwave entrainment by way of various Tong Ren Healing machines.

My siblings and I helped our dad build Tong Ren Healing machines -- stripping wires, soldering metal parts, gluing together pieces. Patients told us about their miracles. Dad taught his healing methods, and students started their own practices throughout the country and world. After finishing his master's degree, my older brother switched fields and went into acupuncture and Tong Ren. My younger sister stepped into the trade straight out of college.

My journey with embracing Tong Ren Healing started 10 years ago when I picked up a camera and began filming my father. I followed him to Italy where he lectured to a room full of top physicians. I went with him to New Mexico to celebrate a Tong Ren Healing center built by a Native American medicine man. I stood on stage with him in Florida where he introduced Tong Ren to a convention center-filled hall.

Most importantly, I filmed him as his daughter, conversations on the side of a road, dinner time after a long day with patients, on the floor of his study with pajamas on and building Tong Red Healing machines together. I also began to dive into a mountain of VHS and DV tapes that my father filmed of himself when he first started his discoveries going back to the 1980s.

ABOUT THE FUNDS

What’s left to film are interviews with doctors and scientists around the country, plus a journey to China to understand my dad’s beginnings and his journey to now. There’s also the mountain of VHS and DV tapes that need to be digitized. And then we can finally start putting it all together in the edit and post-production.

Please feel free to contact me personally for further details, comments, or questions. [email redacted]

And thank you for your generosity!