Director: Cheung Yuen Ting Mabel

Artist: ---

To chronicle this monumental move, the school decided to make a documentary on the transformational project. And instead of a purely factual record of the campus move, the film would emphasize on a human perspective that reflects the interplay between people and the objective events happening around them. In our case, this would be the growth and development of these teenage girls in the two contrasting neighborhoods, against the drastically changing backdrop of Hong Kong from a British colony to a Chinese city over the past two decades. Since the girls who entered the school in 2011 would spend their first academic year in the last year the old campus was still being used, then spend their next four years on the temporary campus in a completely different neighborhood, and finally return to the newly finished campus for their last high school year, they would have the unique experience of studying and growing up in all three campus sites. In short, the kind of experience that’s just right for our experiment. And so, the shooting team embarked on the project with this plan in mind. A sample of 6 girls were carefully chosen from the 2011 entrants as “focus students”. Each one of them had different personalities, interests, peer circles and family backgrounds. As shooting began, the girls were asked to write a letter to their future 19-year-old self, sharing their individual dreams and ambitions in life. The letters would be opened at the end of their high school years, like a time capsule, to see how much of their dreams and ambitions they had persevered and achieved. Like everything else in life, the redevelopment did not move forward as planned. The monumental project encountered significant obstacles and delays, and the girls never made it back to the new campus on schedule. As a result, the documentary was not completed until 2019, running into the fiery beginning of the most turbulent years of Hong Kong since its return to China in 1997. How did t