Hong Kong protest documentaries made to jump through hoops by authority ahead of screening, local film group says
- Non-profit group Ying E Chi Cinema says they were ordered to add warnings to films, but could not indicate these were at government’s behest
- One of the two, which covered the siege of PolyU, received an ‘adult only’ rating just two hours before it was to screen
Vincent Tsui Wan-shun, artistic director of Ying E Chi Cinema, a local non-profit arts group that distributed the independent documentaries, said the warnings – described by industry veterans as “unprecedented” in the Hong Kong movie industry – were among the obstacles thrown up by the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration (OFNAA) in an effort to bar them from screening the films.
After rounds of exchanges with the film classification authority, Tsui said his organisation compromised by adding the warnings to the two documentaries, only for OFNAA to then insist they not reveal the messages came from the authorities. The body also rated one of the films “adult only” just two hours before it was set to be shown.
“They forced us to add something against our will into our work, while forbidding us from attributing it to them,” Tsui told the Post on Tuesday, a day after the films screened at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on Monday night. “It’d be very problematic if the audience misunderstood and thought the warnings were from the filmmakers.”
At the centre of the controversy are two documentaries directed by anonymous filmmakers about major clashes between anti-government protesters and police last year: Inside the Red Brick Wall, which captured last November’s siege of the Polytechnic University (PolyU) campus, and Taking Back the Legislature, centred on the storming of the Legislative Council building on July 1, 2019.