In one of the anecdotes in McDull, Prince de la Bun, McDull makes a comment (a bit after 19 minutes) about how his single mother takes J.K. Rowling's success as encouragement for her to continue recounting her stories. Thus, the "present day" portion of the film must have occurred after the first Harry Potter book was published (so at the earliest, post-1997). The mention of 两文三语 (an oft-used phrase by the Hong Kong government) approximately six minutes in corroborates this (at least per my reading of this Chinese Wikipedia article). Moreover, we see at 1:04:48 that the grave plot Mrs. Mak has reserved has a mobile phone number on its sign, which might push the date even later.
What I'm having trouble figuring out is what years the portions of the film that concern Mrs. Mak's younger years where she interacts with McDull's father (McBing) correspond to. I might expect the section that comes before McBing meets with Mrs. Mak to have a looser correspondence to actual history, since it's more overtly fantasy, but the portion I'm concerned with seems to explicitly take place in some older version of Hong Kong.
About nine minutes in, there is old footage of workers at a factory (with Mrs. Mak's face superimposed on one of the worker's, as this is meant to be a recollection of her younger years), but I can't identify the year of it.
After 47:00, we see the destruction of a floating restaurant, but I'm unsure if this is supposed to correspond to anything. The boat is still burning when McBing leaves Mrs. Mak, so it would appear that the entire sequence (between him meeting up with her and him leaving) is supposed to take place within a short period of time. (Then again, maybe this is just a fantasy element?)
There are some posters on the walls (of celebrities I don't recognise) after 47:30.
At 49:23, we see a member of the police stand atop a raised platform to direct traffic. From what I am aware of, this practice was definitely gone by the 2000's in Hong Kong, and I don't think it was used much (if at all) in the 1990's.
At 50:49, McBing pays the fortune teller with a bunch of colonial one-dollar notes. Wikipedia tells me that 1 HKD notes were phased out in 1960. (That this is used at all and that there is a copy of The Little Prince on the shelf at 55:45 indicates that this should be post-WWII.)
Is there a consistent sense of when this period corresponds to, if at all? I'm starting to get the impression that some of the evidence may even be contradictory: if McDull is still in kindergarten in the "present day" period (see 2:05) and his father is really McBing, it would be odd for McBing to have left before 1990 (which would seem at odds with some of the other details). But it occurs to me that I might just be too unfamiliar with the historical context to judge properly, so I am looking for confirmation.
