Hong Kong-born filmmaker Mary Stephen digs into her family’s past in new documentary
Being raised in a Chinese family with an English surname left Mary Stephen with questions she seeks to answer in her new documentary
For most of her life, veteran filmmaker Mary Stephen has carried a quiet mystery with her, one embedded in her very name.
Born and raised in Hong Kong to what she describes as “a typical Chinese family”, she has a birth certificate that names her parents as Henry Stephen and Yick Chuk-kwan.
“We were, by all appearances, a typical Chinese family. All appearances, yes, but not our name,” she explains in the film’s trailer.
This discrepancy has followed her from Hong Kong to Montreal and Paris, raising the same questions that she has asked herself for decades.
“Everywhere I go, people don’t just say ‘Mary’ or ‘Ms Stephen’. They always call me ‘Mary Stephen’, all in one go,” she says with a laugh about her non-Chinese surname. “I’ve always been asked why, and I had never been able to answer that, because I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why exactly.”