Time Still Turns the Pages

Cheng teaches at a secondary school. He finds an anonymous suicide note in his classroom; it is not clear who wrote it and there is little time. Thinking through his students one by one, his own childhood comes back. Every evening his father looked at the marks; his mother told the elder brother to study and left the younger one alone. The brother was a good student and one day could not go on. Cheng was not there that day. Years later he looks at children of the same age and hears his father's sentences coming out of his own mouth. Nick Cheuk directs and co-wrote the script; it is his first film and Derek Yee produced. Lo Chun-yip, Ronald Cheng, Sean Wong and Hanna Chan are in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production. The film screened at the 25th Shanghai Film Festival on 11 June 2023 and opened in Hong Kong on 16 November. Nick Cheuk was named best new director at both the 60th Golden Horse Awards and the 42nd Hong Kong Film Awards, and took the audience award at the Golden Horse as well. The director dedicated the film to a friend who took his own life and said so in his acceptance speech. The matter it treats is the pressure of school; the film does not reduce the problem to one family and points at the system. The narrative runs in two times; the classroom of today is cut against the house of the past. The film shows the violence inside the home and does not draw the father as a monster. The narrative takes student suicide in Hong Kong as a direct subject. The ending gives no scene of rescue. Its limit is weight; the narrative is suffocating, the subject heavy, and there is little hope. Who it is for: viewers who like family drama and are curious about the new generation of Hong Kong directors. Who it is not for: it is suffocating, dark, and the ending bitter.