April 5, 2016
Andrew Choi, center, the executive producer of “Ten Years,” with directors and cast members, after accepting the statuette for best film at the Hong Kong Film Awards on Sunday.
Reuters
HONG KONG — In an Oscar-like spectacle on Sunday night, the Hong Kong Film Awards announced 21 movie prizes. Or 20 — if you consulted only reports in the mainland Chinese news media.
That was because the top honor went to “Ten Years,” a low-budget independent production depicting a dark future for a Hong Kong bullied by the mainland government into assimilation. In the lists of award winners published on the Chinese news portals Sina and Tencent and a report by Xinhua, the state news agency, there was no mention of the best film.
With a shoestring budget of about 500,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about $64,000, and a limited theater release, the film has raked in more than 5 million Hong Kong dollars, finding resonance with present-day fears that local culture and liberties are being threatened under Chinese rule. On Saturday, thousands of people flocked to community-organized screenings in more than 30 locations, including public parks and squares.
“We just hope that our feelings are shared by the Hong Kong people,” said Ng Ka-leung, a producer and director of the film, after he won the award. “We want to use our work to ponder the future of Hong Kong.”
“Ten Years” depicts a Hong Kong in 2025 crumpling under the tightening grasp of the Chinese government, even though it had promised a “high degree” of autonomy and civil liberties for 50 years under the “one country, two systems” principle governing the former British colony’s 1997 transfer to Chinese rule. In the dystopian future depicted across five short stories, books are censored, houses are bulldozed against their residents’ will, and the Chinese government uses force and deception to interfere with local politics.
In a scene that coincides with growing calls for Hong Kong’s independence from China, a person sympathetic to those calls sets herself on fire in front of the British Consulate to protest Chinese rule.
In January, after the movie was nominated for the best film award, the Chinese government reportedly ordered the mainland company Tencent and the state broadcaster CCTV to cancel broadcasting agreements of the ceremony. On Sunday night, residents in mainland cities who had tuned in to Hong Kong’s main television channel said on Chinese social media that the program was cut off shortly after it started and replaced with a cooking show.
“I was watching the Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony when, all of a sudden, it was cut off,” a user named MElemenT said on the Chinese social networking site Weibo.
“The more you want to censor something, the more we want to get it,” another user said.
Not everyone disapproved of the apparent censorship of mentions of “Ten Years.”
“It’s a country’s bottom line to oppose secession,” Lu Zhen said on Weibo. “What’s wrong with the broadcasting regulator’s ban on a film supporting independence for Hong Kong?”
In an editorial in January, Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper that often carries nationalist views, denounced the film as a “thought virus” and called it “absurd,” “pessimistic” and “fear-mongering.”
In a report on Sunday night, it described the award ceremony as “fairly quiet” and said the actors “seemed lonely due to the lack of attention.”
Before presenting the best film award, Derek Yee, a director and chairman of Hong Kong Film Awards, said, without elaborating, that it had been hard to find anyone else to present it. Artists have found themselves unable to perform on the Chinese mainland after they declared support in 2014 for pro-democracy demonstrations that the Chinese government deemed unlawful.
“A young producer came up to me before the ceremony and asked if mentioning ‘Ten Years’ would offend anyone,” he said. “I said to him, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ ”
