Bringing emotion to screen

Sense of helping others drives HK director to produce memorable work, Xu Fan reports.

In 2016, upon stumbling across a distressing report detailing the abuse of elderly residents in a Hong Kong care home, director Lawrence Kwan Chun-kan was consumed by anger.

This intense emotion prompted him to ask himself, "Is there something I could do to help as a filmmaker"?

In the following years, Kwan, who delved deeper into the subject, found a script taking shape after reading a series of real-life scandals, including a care facility head suspected of sexually assaulting a woman with intellectual disabilities in 2014, seniors being forced to wait to shower naked outdoors in 2015, and the mysterious deaths of six patients within eight months in 2019.

A Hong Kong native, Kwan graduated from the Vancouver Film School in Canada and made his directorial debut with When C Goes With G7, a romance that was screened in 2013.

It took him five years to prepare and produce In Broad Daylight, his second directorial feature inspired by the 2016 report. During the challenging years, he reveals that he received assistance from the renowned filmmaker Derek Yee and Hong Kong superstar Louis Koo, with the latter providing financial support.