Hong Kong filmmaker Kiwi Chow’s documentary, Revolution of Our Times, won the prize for the best documentary at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, reports South China Morning Post.
The 58th edition of the awards, considered to be Taiwan’s equivalent of the Oscars, was held in Taipei on Saturday.
The documentary, which is about the 2019 anti-government protests in Hong Kong, borrows its title from a protest slogan and records how frontline demonstrators operated during the months of increasingly violent unrest, as per the report. It is notable that it has not been screened locally in Hong Kong.
The report states that Chow chose not to screen the film locally because he did not want to risk the safety of his team, interviewees and cinema operators.
The civil disobedience movement that broke out in Hong Kong in 2019 led to the passage of the national security law in June 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. While the new law curbed the freedom of citizens in several ways, the entertainment sector remained untouched until early 2021, when a documentary screening of a student protest was cancelled in March on the grounds that it spread “messages of police-hating, anti-society and even subversion.”
Later, in October, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council passed a new film censorship law. Aimed at content deemed to “endorse, support, glorify, encourage and incite activities that might endanger national security,” it enables Hong Kong’s chief secretary to retroactively ban films that were previously approved.
Dr Kwok-kwan Kenny Ng, Associate Professor at the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University, one of whose areas of research is film censorship, speaking to Silverscreen India after the passing of the new censorship law, had mentioned that documentary films would be impacted first. “In the past few years, we underwent a series of social unrest and related movements. Documentation of these kinds of social events would be considered harmful to national security and would probably be prohibited under the amended censorship law,” he had said.
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Chow accepted the award on Saturday in a pre-recorded video message and said, “I cried many times when making the film and many times I found comfort, vented my anger and hatred, and faced my fear and trauma through this film.”
He added, “To those who have remained in Hong Kong, myself included and to those to have emigrated overseas, or those who are in prison, even though you may not have the opportunity to see the film, I really pray to God that the mere existence of this film can give you solace and an embrace.”
Chow, whose film was screened at the Cannes International Film Festival, sold the rights to the film to protect himself from legal backlash.
The Golden Horse Awards was founded in Taiwan in 1962. It has been boycotted by mainland China for the past three years after a Taiwanese director called for the island’s independence in an acceptance speech in 2018.