The Hong Kong Film Awards gave a huge dose of support to veteran filmmaker Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting, naming her documentary “To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self” as best film on Sunday, despite local controversy which saw it pulled from screens earlier this year.
The numerical winner on the night was “Detectives Vs Sleuths,” which earned four major awards: best director, best screenplay, best actor (Sean Lau Ching-wan) and best cinematography.
The hugely popular Sammi Cheng was named winner of the best actress award, her first win after six previous nominations.
Michelle Yeoh was on hand to present the prize for best new performer to 10-year-old Sahal Zaman, for his role in “Sunny Side of the Street.” Yeoh, who recently won the Oscar for best actress in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” established her career in Hong Kong and won the same award back in 1986 with “Yes, Madam.”
Cheung, who as both a producer and a director has made a career of painstaking and heartfelt films about Hong Kong, was embroiled in controversy in February, when one of the youngsters from Ying Wa Girls School who had been tracked for a decade in “Nineteen-Year-Old Self,” complained that her privacy had been infringed.
Cinemas in Hong Kong pulled the film after four days of public screenings, despite it having earlier played at the 2022 edition of the Hong Kong Film Festival, last year’s Golden Horse Film Festival and festivals in Europe.
While the film is intensely personal, the past decade has also been among the most politically-charged in Hong Kong’s history, with events including the Occupy Central sit-in of 2014, the unprecedented pro-democracy demonstrations of 2019 that brought an estimated two million people onto the streets, rarely-seen levels of police and demonstrator violence, and a government crackdown that included the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020 and new film censorship strictures.
Organizers of the awards chose to omit screening a clip of “Nineteen-Year-Old Self,” though they played footage from the other best film nominees. Cheung did not attend the ceremony. Instead, her award acceptance speech was read out on her behalf by co-director William Kwok Wai-lun.
After the win for “Nineteen-Year-Old Self” the school apologized for not sending a representative to the awards ceremony. Having previously opposed the public screening of the film, its statement appeared to accept that Cheung and Kwok had acted in good faith. “The school would like to reiterate that, during the course of shooting [of “Nineteen-Year-Old Self”], the team filmed on the principle of consent and knowledge of those filmed. [The team] never intended to force film shoots or to shoot in secret, and we allowed students to quit during the filming process.”
In the last couple of years, several documentaries about Hong Kong have not been able to screen in the city. Kwok had a message for Hong Kong’s documentary makers. “Remember not to be scared, film it first, edit it first and screen it first,” he said.
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