Authoritarian Godzilla versus Hong Kong
Threat to film an escalating fear of handover
In the Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla vs. Kong, Hong Kong becomes the scene of an epic final battle against a monster that threatens to destroy the world. Though the film wasn’t made by Hong Kong filmmakers, it feels symbolic. In the week of its release, a sense of dread increased among the 7.5 million citizens of the territory, as they learned that the legal and governmental independence promised to them for 50 years after the handover of the prosperous British colony to China in 1997 was being dismantled ever more quickly.
Authoritarianism, under which more than a third of the countries of the world live, is at the door. For the film industry of Hong Kong, coming under the giant thumb of the People’s Republic brings with it a sense of fear that at any time a film may be deemed to have broken the national security law, putting its makers at risk of arrest.
Director Evans Chan is based in New York, but has been chronicling events in Hong Kong in films such as We Have Boots (2020), which features an extended segment about the 2019 anti-extradition movement — and the police crackdown.
“I think that what people expected or were unwilling to see happen (after the handover) is actually happening now,” he says.
Since the 1970s, Hong Kong cinema has made waves internationally. By the 1980s and early ’90s, it had established itself as one of the most dynamic, technically audacious cinemas in the world. Directors such as John Woo reshaped the action film, with choreographed sequences that were a direct influence on such films as The Matrix and Reservoir Dogs. Art house directors such as Ann Hui and Kar-wai Wong also left a lasting impression. Many Hong Kong filmmakers began looking to the vast market of mainland China.
“Filmmakers saw the huge potential,” says Enoch Tam, who teaches film and creative writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. “Box office figures could be anything up to hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.”
Yet creative options in China were limited. Scripts had to be submitted to censors and could be rejected without explanation. The permitted genres dominated — action, martial arts, gangster films — while others, such as ghost stories, a strength of the Hong Kong industry, were not approved.
Homosexuality, ultraviolence and erotic content are not allowed.
Talented filmmakers began returning to Hong Kong to make low-budget independent films, in preference to Chinese co-productions. And it was the film Ten Years, released in 2015 (available on Netflix), that exposed the stark difference between local and mainland cultures. A collection of five shorts imagining Hong Kong in the year 2025, it is a dystopian vision of the city under a draconian security law, its very language (Cantonese), under threat.
Described as a “virus of the mind” by the Chinese press, the film was never widely released. Directors of the individual segments, such as Kiwi Chow, found themselves unofficially prohibited from entering the Chinese market.
The film director and producer Vincent Chui, who co-founded the independent film organization Ying e Chi in 1997, says the people of Hong Kong still have the liberty to make and release the films they want, as long as the films are passed by the “bureau” — the Film Censorship Authority.
When Chui made the 2002 drama Leaving in Sorrow, about pre- and post-handover anxieties, he says he didn’t feel any pressure. In 2017, he produced Nora Lam’s documentary Lost in the Fumes, a portrait of young dissidents at the centre of the Hong Kong protest movement, including Edward Leung, then a rising political star, who in 2018 was sentenced to six years in jail for taking part in the unrest in the Mong Kok shopping district in 2016. Even this, Chui notes, was subject only to criticism in the press but “after they imposed the national security law, every (difficulty) that I recall is nothing compared to what happened after it.”
One of the films released by Ying Chi since, Inside the Red Brick Wall — about the police siege of the Polytechnic University during the anti-extradition law protests — has become emblematic. It was made by a collective known as Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, who chose anonymity. They were asked to put a disclaimer on it, saying some “depictions or acts” in it might violate the law and mislead the audience.
They reluctantly agreed. Finding a cinema to show the film, is another matter. Last month, a sold-out screening at a commercial cinema was cancelled at three hours’ notice after an editorial in a pro-beijing newspaper urged the Hong Kong government to ban it.
Chui says, “I always say I wouldn’t do anything to try to challenge anything. I’m just doing something that I have been doing for 25 years.”