Politics in Post-1997 Hong Kong Film
When the Five Flavours Film Festival asked me to contribute an essay on the politics of post-1997 Hong Kong film, my immediate response to the suggested topic was that all Hong Kong film since that time is now political. My statement is controversial, but it highlights how dramatic transformations in the local film industry since Hong Kong’s reunification with China have radically reinvented the local cinema. For most of its history, Hong Kong cinema has been a profoundly commercial cinema, oriented to the mainstream and largely apolitical, except in the ideological sense of upholding colonial Hong Kong’s capitalist principles. This complacent or corroborationist cinema has continued more or less unabated with mainland China’s 1997 assumption of Hong Kong sovereignty, as that nation’s emergence in the past two decades as a global economic and political power means that the mainland’s strong political controls and massive commercial clout now control the majority of Hong Kong film production and talent.
However, for the few remaining films now made in Hong Kong and which are entirely free of mainland influence, their content and style is far more combative than the crowd-pleasing commercial fare for which Hong Kong film was long famed. These films have little or no mainland financing and typically are shot on location in Hong Kong and with predominately Cantonese dialogue (Cantonese is the southern Chinese language most common in Hong Kong, and not the northern Chinese language of Mandarin which is the mainland’s official language). Such films, which are part of a new movement of Hong Kong independent cinema, are “independent” in the financial sense that by rejecting the mainland’s deep pockets requires their makers to operate on unusually small budgets (such as those pieced together from grant funding), and often are made by young directors. And while such films may not have the promotion and distribution of major productions, they also are “independent” in the resonant sense that freedom from economic accountability liberates them to make politically provocative content. In recent years such films have overcome these limitations—and at times overt political obstacles—to command remarkable critical and popular attention.
Protest scene in No. 1 Chung Yin Street
Derek Chiu’s 2018 film, No. 1 Chung Ying Street, which screened at last year’s Five Flavours Film Festival, exemplifies this politically intense subset of recent Hong Kong cinema. The atmospheric black and white film was made for less than half a million dollars, is set in the Sha Tau Kok border region between Hong Kong and mainland China, and begins in 1967, as several characters are caught up in the riots between leftist agitators and colonial forces that roiled the territory at the time. Given Hong Kong cinema’s longstanding apoliticism, the 1967 riots have rarely been depicted in local cinema, and budget constraints further preempt this film from costly crowd shots of the riots’ destruction and chaos. Yet by resorting to the time-honored low-budget technique of keeping frames tight and focusing on faces, No. 1 Chung Ying Street emphasizes the personal cost of protest and punishment. With its focus on political turmoil’s consequences of physical injury and family division, the film dramatically revises longstanding official narratives that have described the police actions during the riots as heralding a new era of prosperity and stability.
Indeed, No. 1 Chung Ying Street’s second half takes place fifty years later, in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella protests against the mainland government, and uses the same set of actors playing different characters to consider similar questions about stability, sacrifice, and the right of self-determination. In this second half of the film, aging activists in various stages of disillusionment confront pro-China urban development, which is razing old Hong Kong neighborhoods to improve mainland rail access to local malls. The plot is drawn from current headlines and the film further underscores its topical currency by highlighting the similarities between art and activism. A subplot in No. 1 Chung Ying Street shows how a post-Umbrella agitator’s hopes to travel are restricted by the criminal charges incurred by his activism. Equally significant, that character is played by indie actor and filmmaker Lo Wai-luk, who is known for his vocal criticism of mainland policy and power.
An interesting film to view in conjunction with No. 1 Chung Ying Street is Vanished Archives, a 2017 documentary that sheds new light on the 1967 riots through newspaper clippings, interviews with witnesses and participants, and recently declassified colonial documents from the British government records. The documentary’s director, Connie Lo Yan-wai, had a two-decade career in television broadcasting before turning to film, but now clearly allies herself with independent cinema’s noncommercial institutions. In 2012 Lo founded the Studio for Public Humanities Limited, which focuses on history documentation, and like her younger colleagues she has distributed her work through festivals and public screenings. When Vanished Archives was rejected by Hong Kong’s major film festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, it was picked up by local film series like the “Independently Yours” program at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. It also ran a highly successful crowdfunding campaign to organize community screenings throughout the territory.
For more contemporary cinematic images of the politicization in Hong Kong independent film, the 2017 documentaries Yellowing and Lost in the Fumes focus specifically on the 2014 Umbrella protests and the organizers who in subsequent years have kept pressure on the local and mainland government. Lost in the Fumes is a study of leading activist Edward Leung, who in 2016 campaigned for a seat in the Hong Kong government, and Yellowing takes a broader look at the 2014 Umbrella protests that launched the localist movement with which Leung is affiliated. Both films were shot by young directors whose close identification with the activists they depict augment their films’ contemporary political resonance. Indeed, because the filmmakers are often more visible than activists—many of whom are battling legal charges and obstructed from travel—the documentarians frequently appear as surrogate political commentators, personally communicating and continuing the message of the protestors they depict.
Yellowing, by Chan Tze-woon
Yellowing, the longer and more grand scale documentary, covers the entire Umbrella protest, as then 27-year-old filmmaker Chan Tze-woon was fortuitously present at the protests on the evening of 28 September 2014, when police deployed tear gas on student demonstrators. Over the next 79 days Chan visited the camps repeatedly to record the developing mood and strategy of the protests, and at one point was himself caught up in the clashes when he was hit on the face by a police officer (the moment is shown in the film). Yellowing premiered at the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival, received strong reviews when it screened at festivals in Taiwan and Vancouver, and was submitted for the Taiwan’s prestigious Golden Horse competition. Yet despite this critical and popular interest Yellowing struggled to find distribution at home in Hong Kong, presumably because of a tacit ban on the film among exhibitors unwilling to incur the antipathy of the mainland government.
Lost in the Fumes, by contrast, takes a more intimate position by following activist Leung as he negotiates the legal and psychological consequences of his political campaign (which include facing charges for rioting as well as personal guilt for drawing a childhood friend into the chaos). Director Nora Lam was just a teenager when the Umbrella movement started, and although she began documenting Leung out of admiration of his heroism her film really took shape when she began to consider his struggles with depression and ambivalence about his public visibility and personal responsibility. Now still only in her mid-twenties, Lam is a recent university graduate who struggles with her own sense of responsibility regarding documentary practice. Is today’s political choice only between protest and police enforcement, as Yellowing or some other accounts of the Umbrella movement suggest? What about apathy, or the personal crises and sacrifices endured by the activists who are her documentary subjects?
The precedent for such cinematic activism in Yellowing, Lost in the Fumes, Vanished Archives and No. 1 Chung Ying Street is of course Ten Years, the controversial 2015 dystopian omnibus film that gained global attention when it became the object of persecution by the Chinese government. The film, which was made for less than $70,000, and imagines Hong Kong pervaded by surveillance and censorship just a decade into future, was accused by the mainland government of being a false and misleading representation. Although it opened to two weeks of sold-out screenings, Ten Years was unable to gain renewed bookings. For many this apparent blacklist of the film only reaffirmed the increasingly repressive environment that Ten Years fictively depicts. To combat the film’s actual repression, Ten Years’ producers and filmmakers collaborated with civic activists to show the film for free for locations around the territory, and often appeared for discussions afterwards.
These activities positioned Ten Years as a de facto continuation of the Umbrella protests, which had erupted when the film was early in production, and which one of the film’s shorts loosely portrays. Because the actual protests had ended the year before the film’s release, and mainland government power had steadily intensified in the intervening months, the virtual imagery of politically aggressive films like Ten Years sometimes seems the only possible space for civil resistance. Ironically, this political power accorded Ten Years—and local independent film in general—was as much an outcome of government censorship as was the film’s own artistic intentionality. Ten Years garnered additional attention when television and internet broadcast of the 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards was interrupted at the crucial moment when it was announced as Best Picture, and in the years since both the Ten Years filmmakers and the Chinese government have continued behaving as mutual antagonists. Since release of the film all of the Ten Years filmmakers avoid crossing the border out of fear of reprisal, and in 2016 Trivisa, another collaborative film organized by Jevons Au—one of the chief Ten Years contributors—was promptly banned in China.
Of course, not all post-1997 Hong Kong films are as politically explicit as Ten Years, No. 1 Chung Ying Street, Yellowing, or Lost in the Fumes, but other independent films from that era also are notable for critical, socially conscious content. The award-winning 2018 and 2016 social dramas Still Human and Mad World, for example, both are intimate stories about interpersonal relationships and the hardships of marginalized individuals. Although both films were made with very low-budgets, they each had major stars who helped draw attention to the otherwise modest productions. And although neither these films have explicitly political settings or plots in the manner of the above described films, these other local indie films carry significant critical and political weight.
Mad World stars veteran actor Eric Tsang and heartthrob Sean Yue as an estranged father and son, who are forced to share a cramped inner room in a subdivided apartment when the son is released from an institution for treatment for bipolar disorder. The film was shot in two weeks and made for less than $300,000, provided by a grant from the local government’s Film Development Fund. Young screenwriters Florence Chan Cho-hang and twenty-eight-year-old Wong Chun (who also makes his directorial debut) spent time in mental health centers and used a real subdivided apartment for visual and experiential realism. Both Tsang and Yue worked without salary to get the film made, and the film’s compassionate depiction of the aging, mentally ill, undocumented and working class struck a chord with critical and popular audiences. At the box office Mad World earned more than ten times its cost, and went on to become Hong Kong’s Foreign Language entry for the U.S. Oscar competition.
Similarly, Still Human, also made by first-time feature director—Oliver Chan Siu-kuen—portrays the tentative friendship that forms between a disabled man and his Filipina helper, who overcome language barriers and the personal disappointments both individuals have been dealt to develop a mutual understanding of each other’s experience. The familiarly sentimental story of empathy offering psychological liberation amidst corporal and economic entrapment succeeds by the strong performances by newcomer Crisel Consunji and longtime star Anthony Wong Chau-sang, who has been a vocal supporter of the Umbrella protestors, and as a result had not since had any major roles. Like Mad World, Still Human has no explicit political plot, but its compassionate examination of neglected populations is an evocative indictment of contemporary social institutions. Indeed, because Still Human was Wong’s first major role since his apparent blacklisting, the film’s indie history and theme of solidarity resonates with the political implications that more commercial productions seemed to have been reluctant to take on by casting Wong.
With both their reduced financial circumstances and the corresponding intensity of their sociopolitical commentary, today’s Hong Kong independent film recalls the social realist cinema once common in the 1950s and early 60s. At that time the local film industry was also split in two, operating in two different languages and with very different economic and ideological circumstances. On one side, lavish Mandarin-language romances and fantasies were crafted by well-funded studios staffed by bourgeois émigré filmmakers whose aspirational lifestyles and longing for an idealized past were consistent with the colony’s capitalist culture. On the other side, a very different strain of Cantonese-language films was made by socialist sympathizers operating on much smaller budgets, who expressed their contrasting values through visually modest social dramas set among the working class.
In the Face of Demolition, an important Cantonese social realist film from 1953
Mad World and Still Human both have obvious affinities with this tradition of Cantonese social realism, as does Distinction, another indie social drama that makes its political point by focusing on marginalized populations, but which lacks the big stars in the other films. The 2018 film was directed by veteran screenwriter Jevons Au, the leading force behind Ten Years and Trivisa, and is primarily set in a school for the mentally challenged. While the film’s story might be interpreted as a parable about government indifference and moral responsibility, Distinction works like Mad World and Still Human to strike a more general but no less effective sociopolitical critique. As with those other films, Distinction uses a bittersweet depiction of hardship and reduced social circumstances to suggest oblique political and institutional commentary.
Indeed, if today’s Hong Kong independent film revives the social spirit and aesthetic modesty of midcentury social realist cinema, the political agenda of the post-97 cinema might also be recognized as a slightly distorted fusion of both sides of midcentury cinema’s ideological binary. After all, today in Chinese-language film it is the nominally leftist platform of mainland China which commands the majority of material resources and market share, while the newly disempowered and financially dependent remnants of postcolonial liberalism who find themselves struggling for exhibition and means of production. Yet as in the socialist realist movement of the past, this new economic marginality of contemporary Hong Kong film is embraced as a sign of their democratic politics. Such films embody their independence both in the modest circumstances of their production as well as through their narrative plots and themes of solidarity.
One such example of Hong Kong film’s embedding of explicit political commentary within accessible storytelling is Weeds on Fire, a 2016 period piece about the unexpected success of an amateur Hong Kong baseball team. Based on the true story of the Shatin Martins, a neighborhood team that started mostly as an attempt to combat teen delinquency, but which in 1984 which went on to defeat a storied baseball team from Japan, Weeds on Fire’s eminently accessible feel-good story might also be an allegory of the film itself, which was made for around $250,000 and led by first-time director Chan Chi-fat. Yet the film also is bracketed with a contemporary voiceover that connects the otherwise innocuous entertainment to the Umbrella protests. Like No. 1 Chung Ying Street, then, Weeds on Fire revisits local history through the lens of today’s political crisis. And while “independent” film is a category usually associated with gritty and relatively inexpensive imagery, other Hong Kong independents like Weeds on Fire use the industry’s longstanding gift for manufacturing crowd-pleasing, accessible fare in order to convey a subversively confrontational message.
Of course, generations of filmmakers since the social realist films of midcentury and before today’s independent cinema also have helped shape the latter’s political voice. In the late 1970s through the early 1990s, Ann Hui and Evans Chan were pioneers in infusing the newly unified Hong Kong cinema with a critical sensibility that celebrates local culture while reminding viewers of the persistent lack of autonomy that the colony inhabited. By the handover, next generation director Fruit Chan injected a new standard of political and aesthetic independence with his 1997 film, Made in Hong Kong, which was shot on discarded remnants of film stock and starred a trio of relatively unknown actors. That and the follow-up films in his “handover trilogy” crystallized a general trend within the industry, which suggested independent film as the Hong Kong cinema’s blueprint for reinvention as mainland policy took power. While Made in Hong Kong—like both the midcentury social realist films before it and the current wave of indie social dramas it prefigured—imply subtle social critique, Chan’s other handover-era films like Little Cheung and The Longest Summer are more prescient of Ten Years and No. 1 Chung Ying Street in explicitly addressing the consequences of Chinese sovereignty.
Most generally, while the new independent cinema in Hong Kong is both radically different from and deeply connected to long-running motifs within the industry, a few key attributes further distinguish it as a noteworthy development. Documentary has never been so prominent in Hong Kong film, and the genre’s current prominence has been facilitated by an equally dramatic rise in influence of independent film festivals and programs. This newfound enthusiasm for nonfiction and expansion of interest away from establishment venues like the long-running Hong Kong International Film Festival also has changed the face of cinematic influence. As indie films like Mad World and Still Human draw star labor both through their strong writing and because of their indifference to mainland blacklist, Hong Kong’s new independent cinema should also be commended for the visibility of female directors and screenwriters.
Finally, I cannot conclude this essay without noting that as I write in June 2019 the Hong Kong streets have been repeatedly filled by thousands of protestors who have mobilized against a proposed law that would allow China to extradite Hong Kong citizens to the mainland. The proposed law is the subject of much suspicion and resistance both because it would be yet another dramatic encroachment on Hong Kong’s rule of law, and because Hong Kong residents fear that an extradition policy could become a political weapon by which the mainland government would silence dissidents and critics. The anti-extradition law protests, which at their height may have involved more than a million people, have recaptured the energy and global attention previously garnered by the Umbrella movement. Possibly involving one in every seven people in the territory, these protests are a stark reminder of how resonant the very word, “independent,” is currently in Hong Kong.
In terms of local cinema, independent film has emerged as Hong Kong’s cinematic surrogate for the actual protests and political action with which the territory increasingly is consumed. While most Chinese-language film today seeks the opportunities of mainland financing and distribution, a small sector of film production in Hong Kong remains resolutely independent of those influences. Hong Kong independent film, like much independent cinema throughout the globe, is more than the economic or aesthetic connotations typically associated with the term. Cinema has always been one of Hong Kong’s most compelling and tangible metonyms of the territory’s sense of self and its place in the world. In Hong Kong’s current phase of vulnerability to mainland Chinese might, independent film also is Hong Kong’s vivid visual and narrative expression of local political dissent.