‘To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self’ review: A thought-provoking look at the lives of young Hongkongers
- Directed by Mabel Cheung of ‘An Autumn’s Tale’ fame, the documentary took 10 years to film and another three to edit
- Movie follows the lives of six girls from Ying Wa Girl’s School from Form One to university
A still from “To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self”. Photo: YouTubeAfter 10 years of filming and another three years of editing, Mabel Cheung, director of An Autumn’s Tale and Eight Taels of Gold, has finally completed her latest documentary, To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self.
Cheung and her team tracked and filmed the lives of dozens of students from Ying Wa Girl’s School over 10 years, following them from Form One to university. The team combed through thousands of hours of footage, eventually deciding to focus on the stories of six girls with different dreams, characteristics and talents.
Filmmaking is extremely complex and time-consuming, but it’s rare for a film to take 10 years to make. Therefore, the cast and the crew should be credited for consistently working on the project for over a decade. The school also moved campus during the filming, and the filmmakers follow the girls from their century-old campus on Robinson Road, to their new building in Sham Shui Po.
The hard work pays off. By condensing the protagonists’ teenage lives into a feature-length film, audiences experience six stories within 136 minutes. The film gives audiences an in-depth look into the moments that shape the girls into the people they become. Some are important times for everyone, such as the resignation of the principal of Ying Wa and the students receiving their Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) scores. But the parts of the film we appreciate most come from the girls’ everyday lives. These scenes make sense later on when you see their effects on the students.
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For example, the girls were asked to write about who wanted to become at the film’s beginning. One girl wrote she wanted to be a police officer. That dream later helped her earn the role of school prefect and shaped her views on the city’s political movements years later. The same can be seen in the stories of the other girls. This helps the viewer feel like they have experienced time alongside the main characters.
It’s very easy for Hongkongers to relate to this film, which shows the anxiety and confusion of growing up as the girls face pressure from school and their peers. It’s also very emotionally stirring to see how the girls react when Hong Kong enters moments of political unrest; the frankness gives the film a feeling of familiarity to all of us who were once (or still are) teenagers.
The documentary is a projection that allows the audience to see themselves through time. It’s not flawless, however: it understands its own incoherency and forces the message that we can only see a fragment of time. The theme doesn’t fit with how down-to-earth the film is, and it would have been less of a cliché if it didn’t include a lecture about time alongside a montage of what we have just seen.
All in all, To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self is definitely worth watching. It gives an honest look into the lives of young Hongkongers that cannot be found anywhere else.