Documentary on the Maryknoll nuns sets its director on new path

It's 1922 and a group of young nuns arrive in Hong Kong transferred from their steamer to shore by sampan. The old archival footage is scratched, lending authenticity to this historical record and the sound of a lone harmonica gives the scene a melancholic feel.

That this visual record of the six Maryknoll Sisters arriving in the city exists is thanks to the savvy of the nuns themselves, but few beyond the sisterhood would ever have seen it if not for documentary filmmaker Nancy Tong.

, her most recent work and a radical departure from her previous work, is a portrait of the American nuns and what they achieved around the world. For Tong the story was intimately woven into the fabric of her own life too.

There are personal touchstones throughout that are markers of her life and memories. Take that lone harmonica playing as the six nuns, dressed in their grey habits, arrive. That sound has a special meaning for Tong. Growing up in Mong Kok in the 1950s, she recalls Hong Kong as a place with plenty of refugees and widespread poverty.

"I remember after the Shek Kip Mei fire there were all these people sleeping on our street. There was one blind man and he played the harmonica and it was the saddest thing in the world [because of] the emotion he put in it," she says.

It took a little convincing to persuade Thomas Wagner, the composer behind the film's score, that a harmonica would work. Blues films and Westerns were the place for harmonicas, he said, but she told him the story of the blind harmonica player and he was won over. The lingering, mournful notes fit the scene perfectly.