This programme will screen three Peter Yung-produced documentaries alongside The System (1979) restored to give an overview of Yung’s stylistic evolution.

Peter Yung Wai-chuen's first documentary One Day in Locke (1971) was made to fulfil the wish of his teacher-mentor James Wong Howe, capturing the first Chinatown in the US. Locke locals were Chinese labourers who had come in the 19th century to build the railroad in California. As time passed, the town slipped into a slow decline which shrouded it in poetic desolation. The Rickshaw Boy (1981) was another product of James Wong Howe’s wishes. In 1980, Yung travelled to Beijing to film retired old-time rickshaw pullers and their lives with family. The footage was juxtaposed with older footage by Howe who had gone to China in 1948 to shoot an adaptation of Lao She’s novel Rickshaw Boy. Beijing was still Peking in a way, but the times had changed. Set in Hong Kong, the narcotics documentary Opium: The White Powder Opera (1976-77) was commissioned by a British television station. Yung, its associate producer and cinematographer, joined the surveillance team of the Narcotics Bureau to acquaint himself with the workings of the drug trade. This paved the way for The System. In addition to the cat-and-mouse game between the cops and the druglord, a fascinating thread traces the relationship among dealers, junkies and mules in Sai Ying Pun. The title hails from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, another tragedy concerned with a capitalist society’s oppressed and exploited nobodies.

The screening on 2 November will be introduced by Peter Yung in Cantonese.

Peter Yung (b. 1949, Hong Kong) was already a renowned photographer when he came to specialise in making documentaries on the drug trade in the 1970s. Yung is unique among his generation of Hong Kong filmmakers as a pioneer and an independent director who often produced his own films. The System is a unique example of merging tragic pathos and investigative journalism with a raw shooting style. His other works as a director include Life After Life (1981) and The Rickshaw Boy (1982) as well as Warlords of the Golden Triangles (1987), the continuation of his exploration of drug-related themes.

Adrian Cowell (1934–2011, United Kingdom) was a pioneering British documentary filmmaker, renowned for his fearless exploration of conflict zones, environmental issues, and the global drug trade. His work often combined investigative journalism with cinematic storytelling, shedding light on underrepresented and complex issues. Notably, Opium: The White Powder Opera (1976–77), a collaboration with Peter Yung, revealed Hong Kong’s role in the narcotics trade and the struggles of addicts and dealers. Cowell was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Cherry Kearton Medal and an International Emmy Founders Award.