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From The New York Asian Film Festival: Hong Kong's Dark Future In "Ten Years" – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

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The New York Asian Film Festival begins this week on the 22nd of June, an annual film festival that features the past year's most popular movies from Asia, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. You can expect arthouse hits and genre fare like gangster movies, horror, action thrillers, romantic comedies, dramas, weepies, and cop thrillers.

So it's something of a coup for the NYAFF to have the Hong Kong movie Ten Years its North American and Western premiere. An anthology film comprising five shorts that take place in 2025, ten years after 2015, when it was made, this is a prime example of popular agitprop cinema that expresse out loud what people in Hong Kong having been thinking and fearing. Two lowly Triad footsoldiers are enlisted to stage a political assassination attempt as part of a false flag operation to justify the government declaring a repressive security bill. A couple sets out to preserve and catalogue the everyday objects after an apocalypse and find themselves equally obsolete and antiquated in this new world. A taxi driver grapples with a Hong Kong where Cantonese is slowly being phased out and Mandarin becomes mandatory, alienating him not just from society and his ability to make a living, but from his own son. Political protests calling for democracy and universal suffrage ends in an act of self-immolation where pundits and authorities debate the mystery of the who did that to themselves even as the government cracks down on protests. A grocery shop owner witnesses the brunt of government censorship as the egg industry is killed off because their name has ended up on the government's censorship list, and witness his son's classmates taking part in censorship and vandalism reminiscent of China's Cultural Revolution as they're used to harass bookshops, but things end on a small note of hope.

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Made for only US$64,000 and with no stars, Ten Years was a hit in Hong Kong before it was mysteriously taken off the Cineplex marquees, but it continued to screen at universities and privately-rented venues. and won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Film this year while the Chinese government condemned it for being a mental "virus". They even blacked out the live award ceremony broadcast in the Mainland and any news reporting on it. The movie is one of the most explicitly political to come out of Hong Kong, a piece of soft social Science Fiction that depicts a dystopian cautionary tale about Hong Kong's fears of being under Mainland Chinese rule.

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Many conservatives and pro-government spokespeople have condemned the movie as antisocial and tried to belittle it but it's really part of the culture war that Hong Kong is currently in against the Mainland, fighting not just for its democratic rights but also its cultural identity, like the right to define themselves through the Cantonese dialect and culture that has defined their personalities, which they hold onto against the encroaching economic and political control of China. It doesn't need big stars to make its point, since its actors all depicted ordinary people on the street that everyone in Hong Kong could identify with: cab drivers, students, academics, shopkeepers, hapless gang members. There are moments of dry, bitter, dark humour and farce as the you find yourself immersed in a near future that feels much like the present, only getting much, much worse. This is Popular Movies doing their job: to collective provoke feelings and emotions that unite an audience in a cathartic ritual of recognition. It also does something extremely rare in Hong Kong and Chinese movies – it features South Asian characters who were born and raised in Hong Kong and acknowledges they should be considered as citizens and locals as much as any Chinese person, that Hong Kong is a more multicultural society than most would care to admit. At this point, nearly every interesting or good Hong Kong movie, including genre pieces like gangster thrillers and cop thrillers are allegories and commentaries about Hong Kong's plight under China, as the other Hong Kong movies in the NYAFF are turning out to be. Since I've been given access to preview screenings I'll be writing about them as I see them.

Ten Years will be screening on July 4th with the producer and directors attending for a Q&A. The New York Asian Film Festival runs from June 22nd to July 9th. If you're in New York, you should definitely go.

http://www.subwaycinema.com/

Looking ahead at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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