When the DVD came back shattered, it felt like a sign. The creators of a Hong Kong protest documentary, titled Inside the Red Brick Wall, had sent it to regulators for a screening approval, as they had done numerous times before without issue.
However, this time the returning envelope was filled with silver shards.
“We didn’t understand why, but it was intentional,” one of the anonymous creators said. “They said it was broken by the DVD machine, but it was intentional — it came back in pieces. It felt intentional, like they were sending a message.”
The screening was approved, but with a higher rating that restricted audiences to people aged 18 or older. The moment marked a significant shift.
A few months later, in March, the theater hosting the first commercial screening of the protest film canceled that same day.
Then, the government-backed funding body, the Arts Development Council of Hong Kong, reportedly withdrew a major grant from the independent film collective that had released it.
The incidents underline the growing intolerance from authorities to anything related to the democracy movement, which wracked the territory for much of 2019.
On Wednesday last week, the Hong Kong Legislative Council criminalized politically sensitive filmmaking, with a law allowing broad censorship under the guise of national security.
The new law bans any films that the government deems could “endorse, support, glorify, encourage and incite activities that might endanger national security,” and allows officials to stop productions and screenings.
Any unauthorized screening of a banned film can incur three years in jail for those responsible, or a HK$1 million (US$128,509) fine.
“The goal is very clear: It’s to improve the film censorship system, to prevent any act endangering the national security,” Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Edward Yau (邱騰華) told the council.
Obvious targets of the law are the rush of protest documentaries released in the past 12 months. The documentaries show some of the protest movement’s most violent moments and follow activists, including some who were later arrested.
Many of the films were made by anonymous teams of like-minded people who met while filming on the front lines of protests, and were inspired to tell a deeper story than reported by international media.
Several filmmakers said that the new law does not affect them much more than the National Security Law already did. Some have gone to ground, working anonymously, while others have fled Hong Kong.
The biggest effect of the new censorship law would be on Hong Kong’s status as an international film hub and the territory’s rich catalogue of lauded, thoughtful and often political films, several said.
Last week’s law allows Hong Kong Secretary for Security Chris Tang (鄧炳強) to ban the screening of existing films if he determines they threaten national security.
“We have so many films critical of governments, especially from before 1997 when we were still a colony of Britain,” the Inside the Red Brick Wall filmmaker said.
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