The reviews for the documentary was mixed. On one hand, it was praised for capturing the local school culture and the stories of her subjects in a way that resonates with audiences who also studied at local girls’ schools. On the other, it received criticism for infringing on the students’ privacy when they no longer wanted to be filmed halfway through the project. Some also questioned how Cheung’s narration seemed to overshadow the students’ stories.

But Cheung begs to differ: “I was just an observer. I let the girls be their own director, because they’re the director of their own lives. We shot whatever we could, whatever the girls showed us or were willing to show us. In that way, this project is very different from what I usually do”.

The 72-year-old director adds that because the students didn’t know who she was, hadn’t seen her films before and didn’t even know what a director’s work involved, “you had to put yourself at their level to earn respect, because you are not their parents or their headmaster. You are nothing to them. I was just a person who followed them around, always making trouble [to their lives]. The balance of power is really not the same as some other projects”.

It was also equally challenging to trim down 300,000 hours of materials into just two hours and 15 minutes. “Shooting the film was relatively easy, but cutting it down was a tremendous task. We spent three years cutting the film”, Cheung says.

Sitting with Tatler in late January in a brightly lit new classroom at Ying Wa Girls’ School, overlooking the Mid-Levels and with the Victoria Harbour skyline now blocked by high-rises, Cheung, who is an alumna herself, proudly introduces the beautiful, well-facilitated new campus. However, her favourite memory of her school is the people; namely her teachers and classmates. She also thinks that while Ying Wa’s ambience has remained more or less the same, this generation of students faces new challenges. “In my time, we didn’t have the internet, so we were spared from cyberbullying.”

She also pointed out due to the turbulence throughout 2019 and 2020, “[the subjects of my film] had to experience different kinds of social movements. Under such circumstances, they mature very fast,” she says, “The environment has changed; society has changed”.

Cheung says her documentary also records the changing nature of Hong Kong society—and she wants to continue capturing these changes in her future projects. Cheung, who was appointed a non-official member of the government’s Task Force on Promoting and Branding Hong Kong last month, teases that her next film is about the first ten medical students who attended western medical schools in Hong Kong in the late Qing dynasty. She also has plans to set up another film festival—“the subsidiary of major festivals like Berlin Film Festival or Cannes”—to promote the next generation of local talent.

Yes, that is admittedly a lot to achieve, but luckily the septuagenarian director still has the heart of a 19-year-old herself, as well as the drive to dream big. “Play as hard as possible”, she advises young people, "do whatever you like, experience life as far as possible, because that’s the best time, and don’t [have] any regrets”.

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