Outdoor Screening: Jenny Suen and Christopher Doyle’s Drama ‘The White Girl’

Description

Set in the fictitious Pearl Village, “Hong Kong’s last fishing village”, The White Girl (Hong Kong, 2017) is both a film about the space between people and an allegory for Hong Kong.

The film’s protagonist, The White Girl (Angela Yuen) lives with her father in a stilt house. Because she is allergic to the sun, her skin is ghostly pale and she is shunned by her classmates and neighbours, who see her wraith-like appearance as a bad omen. Her only escape from this dreary life is the sea cave she visits in the evenings, brooding next to a churning sea. That’s where she meets Sakamoto (Joe Odagiri), a Japanese loner who had recently taken up residence in an abandoned villa in the hills above the village. Sakamoto, meanwhile, has struck up a friendship with a street kid named Ho Zai (Jeff Yiu), who lives with a mute Buddhist monk who builds Rube Goldberg machines in the yard next to his temple.

The fishing village the story is set in is on the precipice of major change. The old way of life is dying, but what the future has in store can hardly be called life: the corrupt village chief is hatching a secret plan with mainland developers to bulldoze the swamp and turn the village into a tourist destination.

Read more about the film here. The open-air screening of The White Girl will be followed by a Q&A with Jenny Suen, the film’s co-director, in English and Cantonese. 

The film will be screened with English and Chinese subtitles.