Circling back

Yeung Chiu-hoi, co-director of The First Girl I Loved (2021), points out the benefits FEFF provides for Hong Kong directors as a platform where "because of cultural differences, we can learn from other filmmakers, (via) their experiences".

Yeung and co-director Candy Ng Wing-shan's directorial debut is a coming-of-age film about a girl who falls in love with her classmate amid the strict, traditional setting of an elite Catholic girls' school. Drawing inspiration from mainland and Taiwan youth movies from 2013-15, Yeung aimed to create something that spoke to his own generation, from the time he and Ng were in high school, back in 2000-03.

Of course, this time period overlapped with the outbreak of SARS, so the film bridges Hong Kong's past and present through the image of students wearing masks as they sit a public examination. This is "the main image we wanted to put in our film", says Yeung, who used it to anchor the story within a memorable point in Hong Kong's history and reconnect with that early-2000s generation.

While Hong Kong missed out on FEFF's main awards this year - they went to the Korean romantic drama Miracle: Letters to the President (2021), directed by Lee Jang-hoon; and the stark and romantic, mainland festival favorite Li Ruijun's Return to Dust (2022) - the Making Waves program was an eclectic and inspiring selection of film offerings from the city's past and present.

Harry Robinson attended the Far East Film Festival as part of the 2022 Campus program for aspiring writers and critics.