A New Doc Captures the Energy of a Late, Beloved Activist for the Disabled

So Ka-ue is a little bit nervous. She’s not withdrawn or at any kind of loss for words but she admits she’s not sure what to expect on this day – the first time she’s been asked to interact with media from the other side of the camera. So just put the finishing touches on her first documentary as director, Ah Cheung: Wings of Hope, a film she’s been working on for four years. She completed post-production at the end of October, just days before the film’s Hong Kong Asian Film Festival premiere, so it’s no wonder she’s a bit on edge.

Though she’s making her debut, So isn’t a novice by any stretch, and has been working steadily as an editor since she graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) in 2014. For most of those years, So was actively thinking about her first film and looking for documentary material, partly because working behind the scenes made her want to get involved with the world at large. “I felt that I needed to connect with the community. I didn’t want to sit in an office editing all the time. I always felt like I got to know the people in the films I edited; some were in post for a year. I didn’t want to be a stranger. I wanted to know these people.”

Which is where disability rights advocate Law Wai-cheung, or Ah Cheung to most, came in. Introduced to Law by his friend and one-time social welfare sector co-worker Willy Kwong (who also co-executive produced the film), So felt inspired by Law’s unsentimental, brass tacks approach to life in a city where the disabled are still stigmatised and suffer poverty and unemployment at rates disproportionate to the overall population.

“His story had a lot of elements I wanted to explore, and I’m quite passionate about telling stories about people and their connection to where they’re from, where they live and their destinies,” she says. “Then I met him, and I visited him every week as his health worsened. Friends visited constantly and I got a very good idea of how powerful his story was.”

So took a roundabout route to documentary, first earning a diploma from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she studied graphics and communications and later enrolling in the HKAPA’s film department. Her graphics education put her in the orbit of other students who were budding documentarians and the format piqued her interest. She majored in editing, and so “got lucky” after graduating, landing post-production and editorial assistant work on local films like Helios, Trivisa and most recently Anita. About a year later, the HKAPA put her in touch with Oscar-winner Ruby Yang, who was looking for an editing assistant. 

“To be honest, I’m not a cinephile,” she says. “My family went to the movies very, very rarely. My film education began in film school. But I do like Agnès Varda  and Joris Ivens, particularly A Tale of the Wind. And I definitely watch Ruby’s docs.” If she were looking for someone to show her the ropes of doc filmmaking, she couldn’t have asked for better, working with Yang on Ritoma (2018) and later as editor on Vincent Du and Han Meng’s China’s Forgotten Daughters (2018). “But I am still learning, and still figuring out how I want people to engage.”

Ah Cheung is a lean 50 minutes, a portrait that draws from archival material, animated sequences that illustrate Law’s childhood and over 100 hours of So’s own recordings. Born in 1963, Law grew up in a seventh storey flat he was unable to leave until he was 11. Paralysed due to an oxygen shortage during birth, he spent those first 11 years staring out a window. He finally started an education at 12, landed a factory job in his late-20s and made history as Hong Kong’s first wheelchair-using insurance agent. 

So tapped Macanese animator John Wong Weng-chon (who has won acclaim for his short films Wong, Bitter Gourd and Mui) to realise Law’s childhood in soft, watercolour-style images, largely because there was little in the way of visual documentation of those early years. “Animation can show what he was going through very vividly,” says So. “And John likes to experiment but at the same time he’s flexible enough to think about Ah Cheung as a person and as a character. You call it soft but I liked the rawness of the animation. It’s not polished and fantastical.”

That’s entirely in line with the film’s scrappy, personal, DIY feel, and though Law is a local legend for his activism, Ah Cheung doesn’t focus too heavily on his achievements as much as it could. Citing the wealth of material in press archives and online, So was confident Law’s everyday existence — triumphs and failures — would speak louder than any archive. “His story is powerful, and moving, and it includes the community, and I thought that was important. He didn’t just live in the city, he participated in it,” So says.

Law has received accolades from the Hong Kong Red Cross, Rotary Club of Admiralty and the Hong Kong SAR Government among others, and he has advocated for the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Hong Kong, a public transport concessionary fare for persons with disabilities, and a subsidy for persons with severe disabilities from the Community Care Fund. He pushed for support for independent living for the disabled and influenced hearts and minds simply by being himself, even as his health deteriorated between the time he and So met in 2020 and his death at 58 in 2022.

After its premiere at HKAFF, Ah Cheung has an unclear road ahead of it. Producer Catherine Chan recognised it was a hard sell even before So started shooting. Funding was cobbled together from a combination of pitching forums, the L Plus H Creations Foundation, help from co-executive producer Yang’s Hong Kong Documentary Initiative, the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, an Eye Catcher jury prize, the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Swire’s Charitable Trust and the Central and Eastern European (CEE) animation workshop (Chan lives part-time in Denmark). 

Exhibitors have been cautious about docs since the Mabel Cheung controversy over To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self in 2023, and the form has always faced an uphill battle to be seen. “And it’s a mid-length film, which is tricky,” admits Chan. “I would love cinemas to be more generous, but we very much want to have more community partners that could organise screenings for more people.” Ironically, additional funding materialised late in production when the library managed and staffed by differently-abled people in an accessible working environment — an unrealised goal for Ah Cheung at the time of his death — put him in the news.

At first blush Ah Cheung could come across as a downer: another doc about how awful the world is and how helpless we are to change it. But it isn’t, thanks to Law’s charisma. “If you think the film is optimistic, it’s because Ah Cheung was optimistic,” says So. “He never blamed systems. If he came across a problem he actively looked for a way to solve it. If he came across an inconvenience he looked for a solution. He really wanted to be the middleman to helping people; to be the bridge. He was able to do this because the people around him appreciated him as a person, and that’s why he’s remembered the way his is.”

So has been digesting what she gleaned from seeing Law every week for two years, and then another two piecing together a narrative that did justice to him as an individual. In some ways, Law put So on her current path, one that turns a lens on the marginalised; she’s thinking about centring her next film on elderly Hongkongers in the workforce. Looking into these margins dovetails with So’s ambitions to use filmmaking as a way to understand humanity better, to some its purest function, as renowned film critic Roger Ebert summarised when he stated film was as “a machine that generates empathy.”

“Ah Cheung understood the value of storytelling and how it can influence people,” says So. “He taught me to appreciate how difficult some of the littlest things can be. He taught me how to communicate. I’m thankful I was able to walk through a difficult time with him.” She pauses. “Ah Cheung lived with objective limitations, concrete limitations, but he still found a way forward in life. I hope other people facing difficulties are encouraged to find a way to break through too.”

Ah Cheung: Wings of Hope will be presented at the University of Hong Kong on November 29, 2024. Click here for screening updates.