Hong Kong is a city divided. For the past two years, people have been caught in a war of political ideologies between pro-democracy liberals who fear mainland China’s increasing influence over Hong Kong’s political and social policies and pro-establishment conservatives (some with vested interests in China) who wish to follow the mainland’s lead in the name of peace and prosperity.
During the 2014 “Umbrella Movement”, which saw young pro-democracy activists occupy several major thoroughfares for months, intense family squabbles over politics were a common occurrence that further widened the ideological gap.
In early 2014, even before the Umbrella Movement, young filmmaker Ng Ka-leung wanted to express his peers’ pessimism for Hong Kong’s future through film. Along with four other filmmakers, he created Ten Years, an independent collection of short films built around a single question: What will Hong Kong be like 10 years from now?
The shorts aren’t fantastical sci-fi concoctions with flying cars and futuristic landscapes, but rather cautionary tales that express one political spectrum’s anxieties and displeasures in more realistic ways.
The shorts aren’t all political – Wong Fei-pang’s Season of the End is about the death of Hong Kong’s cultural heritage in the midst of rapid modernisation, and Dialect is about the fear of Cantonese being replaced by Mandarin as an official language of Hong Kong – but the ones that are political are so inflammatory that China’s state media outright condemned the film as senseless fear-mongering.
When it received a nomination for Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, mainland Chinese Internet video platforms abruptly cancelled their planned simulcasts of the award ceremony.
How far does it go?
Kwok Zune’s Extras supposes that the Chinese central government and local pro-establishment groups are colluding with triads on false flag assassinations to drum up support for a controversial national security law in Hong Kong – a law that once saw 500,000 people take to the streets in mass protest.
Chow Kwun-wai’s Self-Immolator features pro-Hong Kong independence activists (a real political force that has risen to prominence in recent months) and implications that Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement won’t gain any real traction until people are willing to die for it.
Ten Years is not the first Hong Kong to tackle politics head-on – Evans Chan’s The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian, Herman Yau’s From the Queen to the Chief Executive and Alfred Cheung’s Her Fatal Ways are just a few examples.
But Ten Years is one of the more effective attempts at inspiring mass audiences to take a more active stance in Hong Kong politics. It makes an emotional appeal to convince Hongkongers to start caring about issues that could affect them in the future – to consider the loss of Hong Kong’s unique identity, erosion of civil liberties and ordinary citizens’ lack of sway over government policies that affect their lives.
When Ten Years picked up the Best Film award at this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, some industry veterans questioned whether a low-budget indie deserves to win such a prestigious award.
While Ten Years has low production values compared to its fellow nominees (each section only had a slightly higher budget than a Fresh Wave short), it compensates for its budget limitations with its relevance to the times and its ability to evoke powerful raw emotions in its target audience.
Ten Years is a rare breed, an effective piece of activist cinema that has also been embraced by mass audiences (it has already made 10 times its budget at the box office). For that alone, Ten Years may be the most important Hong Kong film of recent years.