Hong Kong actor Angela Yuen calls for eradication of film industry’s misogynistic culture
A Hong Kong actor has called for the “eradication” of misogynistic film industry culture in a widely shared social media post detailing sexist jokes and unwarranted physical touch by male colleagues.
Angela Yuen posted an Instagram essay in the early hours of Tuesday morning recounting multiple instances of verbal sexual harassment by a journalist, a director, and other male colleagues, without naming them. She added that a veteran actor once kissed her on the cheek during filming without prior consent.
The Chinese-language essay, titled “The Apologies That Will Never Come” and first published in April in her City Magazine column, opened with her recollection of a media interview for her 2026 film Gamer Girls, which features five female leads. A male journalist used a term associated with hostess clubs to describe interviewing the women, Yuen recalled.
Multiple instances
While Yuen called out his inappropriate remarks, the journalist did not apologise at the time and carried on with the interview, she said.
Yuen went on to recount other instances of verbal sexual harassment, including a director telling her: “You are not the type people want to [have sex with], but rather stay good friends with.”
On another occasion, a drunk colleague asked her in vulgar terms in Japanese whether she liked his penis, Yuen wrote.
Separately, a male veteran actor joked multiple times that Yuen wanted to kiss him, and later kissed her on the cheek during filming without prior communication, she said.
She added that, during filming, male actors would sometimes suggest that cinematographers deployed camera cranes solely to shoot female actors’ breasts from a high angle.
“How naturally these things happen often make you question yourself and blur your moral judgment. You need to expend a lot of effort simply to get the facts right, never mind objecting immediately,” she wrote, adding that many men tend to find excuses for such behaviour.
Yuen said she eventually mustered the courage to demand an apology from the colleague who made sexual remarks in Japanese while drunk. Although the man apologised, Yuen said her attempt to seek accountability was mocked by others present.
‘Systemic denial’
Yuen described a culture in which women have no channel to seek accountability for sexual harassment.
Even if a woman publicises an incident on social media, news media often decontextualise her account, she said, adding that netizens also tend to question and impose harsh moral judgment on victims.
“This creates a chilling effect – when victims speak out, their privacy may be infringed and their experience may be dismissed or ridiculed… making a lot of women choose silence after being hurt,” she wrote. “The price for speaking out is often unbearable.”
“The silence at the scene, the business-as-usual afterwards, and my own struggle and self-condemnation are all proof that this system works perfectly – it allows offenders to be free of responsibility, causes [victims] to self-doubt, and pushes onlookers to maintain surface-level peace.”
Yuen said change must stem from not treating sexual harassment as “individual events,” and urged a “complete eradication” of the environment that leads to such behaviour.
“We must instead see the deep-rooted, systemic denial – a denial of female subjectivity, of their right to be treated seriously and professionally, and of their right to define what counts as respect and what counts as an offence,” she wrote.
Yuen’s post had received more than 46,000 likes on Instagram as of Tuesday morning, with messages of support pouring into the comments section as many thanked her for speaking out.
Cultural reporter Wong Wing-leung, known by his pen name Red Eye, apologised on Tuesday for his “bad-taste jokes” during the interview with the cast of Gamer Girls, which he said was conducted late last year.
“I knew I misspoke, and I regretted that the interview could be finished only by other interviewees smoothing things over. It was poor handling that I did not immediately apologise to all the interviewees,” Wong wrote in an Instagram post.
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Hans Tse is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in local politics, academia, and media transformation. He was previously a social science researcher, with writing published in the Social Movement Studies and Social Transformation of Chinese Societies journals. He holds an M.Phil in communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Before joining HKFP, he also worked as a freelance reporter for Initium between 2019 and 2021, where he covered the height - and aftermath - of the 2019 protests, as well as the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.
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