Hong Kong documentary pulled from cinemas 3 years ago set to be screened

A still from Mabel Cheung’s documentary To My Nineteen-year-old Self.

Photo: Golden Scene An award-winning documentary capturing the lives of six girls over 10 years by Hong Kong director Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting will be screened at a film festival in Italy, three years after it was pulled from local cinemas due to a lack of consent from interviewees.

To My Nineteen-year-old Self, which centres on Ying Wa Girls’ School, was one of the four special screenings revealed in the Far East Film Festival’s line-up on Thursday.

The film festival, to be held between April 24 and May 2 in Udine, Italy, listed the documentary among 24 titles in its “out of competition” section – a category for films of “extreme value” that do not meet certain event requirements.

Cheung and co-director William Kwok Wai-lun as well as a producer, two unit directors and a post-production coordinator of the documentary were also on the film festival’s guest list uploaded on the same day.

Cheung reportedly said the screening was handled by the documentary’s distributor, Golden Scene.

The South China Morning Post has reached out to Cheung, Golden Scene and the Ying Wa Girls’ School for comment.

The documentary was pulled from screening in Hong Kong cinemas four days after its official release in February 2023, amid a brewing controversy over the lack of consent from interviewees. “Ah Ling”, one of the students featured heavily in the documentary, wrote to Ming Pao Weekly and complained that the documentary was screened publicly without her consent.

Filmmaker Mabel Cheung (second right) with students from the documentary movie and the girls’ then school principal.

Photo: Handout Olympic medal-winning cyclist Sarah Lee Wai-sze also complained the film included footage of her interview conducted by Cheung in 2016.

She said she had never agreed for the footage to be used in the documentary for commercial screening.

When announcing the suspension of cinema screening, Cheung said she and the school agreed to deal with the issues as they thought people were more important than the film itself, hoping to have space and time to discuss with the girls and the relevant parties.

Cheung also said the girls had signed consent forms at the beginning and in the later stage of production, and were also told the film could be shown in cinemas some day.

The 136-minute documentary features six secondary students from Ying Wa Girls’ School whom Cheung’s team had tracked for a decade to witness their

原文链接: 南华早报