Hong Kong orders blackout for Kidman show on life in province
NICOLE KIDMAN’S new Amazon series about life in Hong Kong, which includes scenes showing pro-democracy protests, will not be shown in the city.
Expats, a six-part series that debuted on Friday, is set in 2014, at the time of Hong Kong’s Umbrella protest movement.
It was billed for worldwide release, but is “currently unavailable” for viewers in the Chinese-controlled territory.
It has not been revealed whether the decision to not air the show was made by Hong Kong’s authorities or Amazon Prime Video.
Yesterday, the Hong Kong government said it had no comment on the “operational arrangement of individual businesses”.
The Telegraph contacted Amazon for comment.
The series, created by Chinese-born American filmmaker Lulu Wang, and based on the 2016 novel The Expatriates by Janice Y K Lee, centres on the lives of three American women.
It includes scenes recreating the Umbrella protest, a 79-day occupation of several major Hong Kong streets to oppose restrictive election rules.
The movement was a precursor to the 2019 anti-government rallies that at times turned violent and prompted Beijing to impose a draconian national security law in 2020 to stamp out dissent.
Critics of the law say it has crushed citizens’ rights and freedoms that should have been protected under an agreement signed between the UK and China when the former British colony was handed back to Beijing in 1997. In 2021, Hong Kong also passed censorship laws forbidding broadcasts that might breach the national security law.
It was unclear whether those rules covered streaming services.
The filming of Expats created controversy in 2021 when Kidman was allowed to avoid some of the strictest Covid quarantine rules in the world to shoot scenes in Hong Kong.
Authorities justified her exemption by saying it was for “designated professional work” that contributed to the “growth of Hong Kong’s economy.”
Some local politicians said the decision had backfired, arguing the city was not portrayed in a positive light, the South China Morning Post reported.
“The government … provided assistance, for Kidman in particular. If there had been better understanding beforehand, today’s reaction would not have put the government in an awkward position,” said Doreen Kong, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council.