November 11, 2016
A pro-democracy demonstrator shrouded in tear gas near Hong Kong’s government headquarters in September 2014. An educational group in the city has called off a screening of a film about the protests.
Xaume Olleros/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BEIJING — The filmmaker Evans Chan was delighted when an educational center in Hong Kong agreed to screen his new documentary about the Umbrella Movement, the pro-democracy demonstrations that convulsed the city in 2014.
But then, two weeks before the event, scheduled for Tuesday, the Hong Kong Center of the Asia Society canceled the screening of the film, “Raise the Umbrellas,” citing political concerns. Mr. Chan, who is from Hong Kong, said he was disappointed but not entirely surprised.
“Where Hong Kong is concerned, I feel that it is actually becoming more like Tibet, but without Tibet’s political or cultural sexiness for the international community,” Mr. Chan, 54, said in one of several interviews by email and telephone from New York, where he lives. “That being said, I’ll try my best to be Hong Kong’s chronicler.”
Tibet is officially designated as an autonomous region within China. But while Hong Kong, a former British colony, was guaranteed a “high degree” of autonomy and civil liberties when it reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, Tibet faces the same strict limits on political expression as the rest of mainland China.
The prospect of Hong Kong becoming more restrictive like Tibet has grown over the last year, artists, filmmakers and scholars say. Commercial venues and educational organizations such as the Asia Society, they say, have appeared increasingly unwilling to show controversial works amid the contentious struggle over Hong Kong’s political future.
S. Alice Mong, the executive director of Hong Kong Center of the Asia Society, said in an email that the cancellation stemmed from concerns over the organization’s “nonpartisan” profile.
“Asia Society is a nonpartisan educational institution, and we aim to present programs that are balanced and present both sides of a topic,” Ms. Mong wrote. The concern was not the 117-minute documentary itself, she said, but rather the post-screening panel, which would have only featured speakers with pro-democracy viewpoints.
Last December, the society screened a 25-minute “work in progress” version of Mr. Chan’s documentary. Afterward, several scholars who are based in Hong Kong spoke, but none were pro-Beijing, Mr. Chan said. “No attempt was then made at inviting pro-Beijing politicians or commentators to participate in the panel discussion,” he said.
For the Tuesday screening, Mr. Chan said that an effort had been made to invite pro-Beijing speakers, but it was unsuccessful. He added that it was unlikely that any pro-Beijing figure would agree to participate in such a discussion given Hong Kong’s highly polarized political atmosphere, making the society’s conditions difficult to fulfill.
One person who appears in the full-length documentary, Jasper Tsang Yok-sing, a founder of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, a leading pro-Beijing political party, was invited to speak but declined, citing prior commitments, an assistant to Mr. Tsang said.
Ms. Mong said the Chinese government had played no part in the society’s decision to remove the film from its program. “It was entirely our decision,” she said.
The Hong Kong Center, a former British military post nestled in a lush hillside in the heart of the city’s business district, would have been a prestigious venue for the film’s local premiere. The global premiere took place in October at the Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan.
The documentary examines Hong Kong’s democracy movement through the prism of three generations of activists: Martin Lee, a retired legislator; Benny Tai, a legal scholar who was among the conceptualizers of the monthslong demonstrations; and Joshua Wong, a student leader.
The protests came in response to a decision by the Chinese government in August 2014 imposing a restrictive framework on the elections for Hong Kong’s next leader, the chief executive, a move seen by many in Hong Kong as allowing only pro-Beijing candidates to run for office. The protests that broke out that September in favor of more democratic election procedures became known as the Umbrella Movement, for the umbrellas protesters employed as shields against the tear gas and pepper spray used by the police.
Over the last year, it has become increasingly difficult to screen politically controversial films in Hong Kong, said Vincent Chui, a filmmaker and the artistic director of the independent film collective Ying E Chi, which means “Film Willpower” in Cantonese.
This is not because such films are unpopular, he said, but because they resonate with the concerns of so many Hong Kong residents as they face a future under Beijing’s rule.
Mr. Chui said this became evident last year with the film “Ten Years,” which depicts a dark future for Hong Kong in 2025 under a bullying Beijing. The film cost only about 500,000 Hong Kong dollars to make, or about $64,000, and received a limited theatrical release, but it made more than 10 times that.
“After the huge success of ‘Ten Years,’ everyone has become cautious about showing such films,” because they are fearful of provoking Beijing, Mr. Chui said.
Mr. Chui added that he had approached all of the city’s cinema chains to show “Yellowing,” another documentary about the Umbrella Movement, but none agreed. “If they answer,” he said, “they say that they have too many films to be scheduled, they don’t have the space.” The solution, he said, was to go small, and unofficial.
“So we try to find as many venues like independent film festivals, universities, because it’s so easy to show a film today: cafes, community halls,” he said. “But of course it’s not a good situation.”
Mr. Chui, an organizer of the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival, said “Raise the Umbrellas” would be shown there in January.
Mr. Chan said the film had also secured screenings in a few private or unofficial venues.
“I can see programmers and cultural movers in Hong Kong and China being caught in a complex web of constraints,” Mr. Chan said. “Their inability to show a film is often an institutional, rather than personal or professional, decision. The problem is that doesn’t make the cultural life of a people, a society, or my life as an artist and intellectual, easier.”
The Umbrella Movement was over, he said, but remained important. “A film about that epochal event, for me,” he said, “is an act of cultural and political preservation, for posterity, for a civil society.”
It raised crucial questions, he said, “about who and what Hong Kongers are, Hong Kong’s place in China and Hong Kong’s place in the world.”
