Trailblazers in Habits

Evening screening and discussion with Nancy M.Tong, Director; Katy Lang, Executive Producer; and Maryknoll Sisters

Registration: 6:15 pm
Screening: 6:30 pm
Discussion: 7:40 pm
Close: 8:10 pm

In 1912, the Maryknoll Sisters were the first group of Catholic Sisters in the United States founded for overseas mission. Ten years later in 1922, a group of six Sisters in sweeping grey habits arrived by steamer in Hong Kong to begin their mission. They had few resources other than their own faith, dedication, and what can only be described as a divinely-inspired ingenuity. Over the next nine decades, the Maryknoll Sisters established six thriving schools and a hospital in Hong Kong, and basically laid the foundation for Hong Kong’s social welfare system.

Trailblazers in Habits is an intimate portrait of a group of American nuns, the Maryknoll Sisters, who have accompanied the disenfranchised in their struggle for social justice. By turns tragic and joyous, yet always inspirational, this insightful documentary is a revealing portrait of these courageous women. The film weaves together the nuns' own affecting accounts of imprisonment and personal struggle with rare archival footage and poignant reminisces from the beneficiaries of their work. A moving and absorbing chronicle that spans 100 years and several continents, this film celebrates the intelligence and tenacity, the love, compassion, and generosity of these early feminists.

Sister Marilu Limgenco and Sister Joseph Lourdes Nubla will join Director Nancy M. Tong and Executive Producer Katy Lang in a post-screening discussion.

Producer and director Nancy M. Tong was born in Hong Kong and educated by the Maryknoll Sisters. She currently splits her time between New York City, where she makes documentary films, and Hong Kong, where she teaches at the University of Hong Kong. She is renowned for making the seminal film on the Nanjing Massacre, In the Name of the Emperor, which won the Special Jury Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1995. She also collaborated on films including Cancer: From Evolution to Revolution (as Line Producer), which won the George Foster Peabody Award in 2001, and Who Killed Vincent Chin (as Associate Producer), which was nominated for the Best Documentary Film Category of The Academy Awards in 1989. In 2008 she participated in a women empowerment project where she taught Muslim women in Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, and Hong Kong to make their own documentary shorts. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Center.

Executive Producer Katy Lang is the Managing Director of Legal Labs Greater China and North Asia. Based in Hong Kong, she has specialized for the past 20 years in recruiting lawyers for top international corporations and law firms in the Asia-Pacific region. Katy enjoys fundraising for local charities and has led a project building schools in remote regions of China.