February 1, 2016
In “Ten Years,” a film imagining a Hong Kong in China’s tightening grip a decade from now, members of the youth guards throw eggs at a bookstore for selling banned books.
Andy Wong
HONG KONG — What will Hong Kong be like a decade from now?
When his new film “Ten Years,” which answers that question with five dystopian tales set in 2025, was denounced as a “thought virus” by the Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times, the Hong Kong director Ng Ka-leung was unfazed.
“If anything, the editorial brought mainland Chinese people’s attention to our small production,” said Mr. Ng, who is also one of the film’s two producers.
“Ten Years” has become a surprise hit across theaters in Hong Kong, tapping into fears in the semiautonomous Chinese territory over the erosion of local culture and civil liberties, fears fed most recently by the disappearance of five people connected to a Hong Kong company that publishes political books banned in the mainland. Since its general release in late December, most showings have been sold out. With a budget of about 500,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about $64,000, the indie production had raked in nearly 5 million Hong Kong dollars by Thursday, Mr. Ng said. On Friday, it received a best film nomination for the Hong Kong Film Awards.
“We didn’t even spend a dollar on promotion,” he said. “We initially thought we were only going to show it in private screenings and had never expected such huge demand.”
In its five short stories, each by a different director, “Ten Years” portrays the Hong Kong of the near future as struggling under the tightening grip of its Chinese Communist rulers, even though the former British colony was returned to Beijing in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” principle with the promise that its freedoms and way of life would be preserved for 50 years.
In one story, “Dialect,” the Mandarin of the mainland has displaced the local Cantonese as the official language. Those who cannot speak it are marginalized.
Hank, a taxi driver, has to post a sign saying he does not speak the language. His income is dwindling, as non-Mandarin-speaking drivers are barred from picking up passengers in some areas. Children are taught in Mandarin at school and, in one poignant scene, Hank’s son walks up to him after class calling him the Mandarin “baba” instead of “loudau” in colloquial Cantonese.
“Ten years ago, they had to learn Cantonese to be here,” a passenger laments to Hank.
In other stories, books are censored, homes are bulldozed against their owners’ will, and the Chinese government meddles in local policy-making, aided by obsequious Hong Kong officials and even hired thugs.
“If people weren’t terrified, who would give a damn about the national security law?” a Chinese official asks in “Extras,” in which the Chinese government hires gunmen to stage a terrorist attack in Hong Kong, hoping to frighten people into supporting such legislation. In 2003, the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a national security law was halted by half a million protesters, who were concerned that it could be used by the Communist authorities to crush dissent.
In “Self-Immolator,” a woman sympathetic to a Hong Kong independence movement pours gasoline over her head and sets herself ablaze outside the British Consulate, a scene that could have been inspired by protests in 2014 urging the British government to stand up against China’s treatment of Hong Kong.
Fantastic as these fables might be, they have clearly resonated with many people in Hong Kong.
“The movie is a reminder that if we do nothing, Hong Kong will become another Shenzhen,” said Oscar Lai, who watched the film with fellow activists from the pro-democracy group Scholarism.
People can discuss just about anything freely in Hong Kong, unlike in Shenzhen, the mainland city on its northern border. But in his annual policy address last year, Hong Kong’s leader, Leung Chun-ying, sternly warned against an article in a campus magazine that he said advocated “self-determination and self-reliance.” Though an independence movement has yet to gain traction in Hong Kong, polls show younger residents distancing themselves from a Chinese identity and wary of closer integration. In 2014, most of them supported, and many participated in, months of protests for freer elections in Hong Kong, startling the world with their defiance and civility.
This month, thousands of people took to the city’s streets to protest the disappearance of the five associates of Mighty Current, a local publisher of scandalous, often thinly sourced, books about Chinese leaders, worried that they had been spirited into China against their will. The Hong Kong police are still investigating how one, Lee Bo, managed to enter mainland China, where he is said to be “assisting in an investigation,” without his travel document. The fastest way to cross the border these days, joked a cartoonist for The South China Morning Post, a local English-language newspaper, is by opening a bookshop.
“Hong Kong people did not care about the booksellers until the disappearance of Lee Bo, the only one who went missing from Hong Kong, not in the mainland or Thailand,” said Nathan Law, secretary general of the Federation of Students, a union active in democracy movements. The group has organized screenings of the film at universities in coming weeks. “People had thought they were safe in Hong Kong,” he said.
“The government’s intransigence to people’s demand for democracy has shaken our confidence in ‘one country, two systems’ since Aug. 31,” he said, referring to the day in 2014 that China announced stringent restrictions on elections in Hong Kong. The move set off the months of protests known as the Umbrella Revolution.
Even the scathing Global Times editorial, describing “Ten Years” as doing “more harm than good” to the city, acknowledged some of the fears reflected in the film.
“The film’s popularity in Hong Kong is generally thought to speak to Hong Kong’s deep anxiety in the past two years,” it said. “Clearly, the implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ is more complicated than thought.”
After the editorial’s publication, comments written in the simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China began appearing on the film’s Facebook page, with many expressing a wish for the film to be shown in the mainland.
Like a gamer who has scored a triumph, Mr. Ng’s assistant posted “Achievement unlocked” on the film’s Facebook page, wearing the Global Times’s disapproval as a badge of honor.
While Mr. Ng agrees that the film portrays a dark future, he points viewers to glimmers of hope. In the closing story, “Local Egg,” which he directed, banned books are pulled off the shelves. But many are stowed away in a secret location, where they are avidly read by rows of young people under a dim tungsten light.
