Inside Hong Kong's Fight for Freedom | Faceless (Full Film) | The Short List

[Music] today we're screening faceless the 2019 hong kong protest captured the world's attention this film was made from inside the movement it paints a picture of hong kong society and a fight for freedom like i've never seen before [Applause] we'll talk to the director afterwards but it's still too risky to show her face on camera directed by jennifer doe here's faceless [Music] what [Music] oh [Applause] oh [Music] is [Applause] [Music] [Music] hong kong [Music] so foreign we begin here in hong kong which is reeling from some of the most dramatic scenes in years protesters are once again gathering to voice their fury at a highly controversial bill that would allow extraditions to mainland china demonstrators fear it spells the beginning of the end for certain fundamental rights 0. this isn't just a demonstration of young people and students kids who are on their summer vacation it's everybody more than a million people out in the streets the largest protests since the handover from brooklyn in 1997. at stake is nothing less than hong kong's status as an island of rights and freedoms in a one-party state [Music] [Music] [Music] i [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] there is very little merit to be gained to delay the bill it will just cause more anxiety and divisiveness in society we were doing it and we are still doing it out of our clear conscience and our commitment to hong kong foreign sensor [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay [Music] foreign [Music] fun [Music] pablo [Music] [Music] foreign foreign okay [Music] [Music] history and colonization foreign [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] my mom [Music] [Music] um [Music] is then at the stroke of midnight history edged hong kong out of the arms a century and a half of imperial rule ended with the lowering [Music] foreign now hong kong people are to run hong kong that is the promise and that is the unshakable destiny [Music] [Music] 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is no way in no way out they have told protesters inside the university that they must surrender [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] go come on oh [Applause] [Applause] uh [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh i love you um [Music] [Music] uh [Music] huh oh [Music] [Music] hey [Applause] uh [Music] the protesters are exhausted their numbers depleted the campus on the verge of being overrun every route they try the police are there to block their escape [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign suffering in her diagnosis legal suffering resists legal oppression so it is though [Music] [Applause] [Applause] okay [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] is m foreign foreign foreign [Music] coming in remotely today from hong kong we have the director of faceless jennifer no welcome hi hi everyone hi why did you have to remain anonymous and faceless today for this interview i chose to be covered up because i think that right now i'm still living in hong kong and i think a certain degree of anonymity would be useful for my work and also kind of for my own personal safety but i do really hope that by not showing my face i can give myself a bit more room um and freedom to do what i would like to do which is continue to write stories continue to report on the things that are happening on the ground so tell me what is your background what inspired you to to make a documentary film about the the protests in hong kong i think when the protests came about in 2019 i was desperate for um an opportunity to cover the protests as someone from hong kong what was going on in hong kong just greatly moved me and i knew that i wanted to take part and i i think i just asked myself that question um like any hong konger at the time overseas would what what's my part in in in this momentous kind of time and um i think i think being able to use my skills as a journalist to cover what was going on was was a good way to do it my background is a bit more um in in news and current affairs so documentary like feature-length films and is very new to me um so i wasn't sure if i could do it but my producer lorraine ma um somehow just decided that i could and she's like eat look we need to do this um and no don't do it for like a like a a western media outlet we need to do it as a local team with local you know people this is our film we'll think about how we can distribute it later on but let's let's get the ball rolling let's get this you know happening we begin here in hong kong which is reeling from some of the most dramatic scenes in years protesters are once again gathering to voice their fury at a highly controversial bill that would allow extraditions to mainland china demonstrators fear it spells the beginning of the end for certain fundamental rights what i love about your film is i love character driven documentaries you don't have one you have four extremely compelling and strong characters that you follow through the film how did you find them we found our four characters through different means some of them we found after meeting protesters on the streets some of them we found through social media some of them we found talking to certain people we knew who were involved and then they introduced us to others and then others so for example um the daughter um i met her through a protester that i knew and i asked her do you know someone who might have a family member who's a police officer it'd be interesting to know what they thought and then she introduced me to another friend who then introduced me to another friend who then introduced me to her so it's it's through a lot of like word of mouth um and most of them are through kind of you need to have that trust to begin with before you can actually find them was there much hesitation on their part a lot of convincing on your part to get them to come on board and to for their own you know protection and safety so in the early days of the protests in 2019 most hong kongers were quite open and willing to talk to the media i think there's a strong sense and understanding that the more media attention they could get the better because it meant that their views can be represented i think what has really really changed in hong kong the past three years is exactly that the willingness to talk and and feeling that there is freedom of expression and that you won't get penalized for um saying something that might not be politically correct they were surprisingly open to talk but filming was a different thing i think once they realize you know we're holding these big cameras and following them around they got a bit nervous so it did take a lot of talking and back and forth and i think that's also one of the reasons why we decided to mask everyone up um and i think that's where my journalism training came into you know became really useful um we did a good risk assessment and we decided that you know a worst case scenario would be they would be arrested because we filmed them doing certain things and so one of the ways to protect them is not to divulge their identities completely which is why we're called faceless [Music] [Applause] okay [Music] [Music] foreign if you could tell me a little bit about what legs you went to to protect the identity of your your characters so after we decided that we needed to mask up our characters we realized that probably masking out might not even be in you know enough and that we needed to give them a higher level of protection um this was more in the editing stage of things we've done most of the filming already this is we're talking about in 2020 but because the police have been going back through the footage and trying to identify protesters and then arresting them it could be months or even a year after the actual protest we realized that we need to do something more so we worked with a really great visual effects person ryan who who was able to do this amazing thing with facial recognition technology you need points on your faces in order to kind of triangulate and and kind of um identify someone so even though our people were massed up there were bits and points where we still needed to change in order to give them more protection so actually in in faceless we changed the shape of people's ears really and because ears are quite a like a notable part of um of a face it's it's used a lot in technology and so we actually change them and maybe bits of their chin and bits and pieces like that in order to protect them and so hopefully this would be able to protect them from facial recognition technology right now of course i think for some characters if it's a close family member or friend if they watch it they probably will be able to kind of recognize them but actually we you know there are things that we have we've tried to put in place in order to protect them this is how risky it has become in hong kong in that the police are using surveillance tech in order to identify and single out and then arrest people we also try to the way we've cut the film and that we never really give you an actual date and there's a reason behind it because it's easy to track a place with a date like a location and a date and then all you need to do is go into the footage cameras stuff like that in a certain area and it's easy to pick people out even if even if they're all in black so what we have done is some of it we have to kind of move around different cuts in order to kind of mask the date or the location of the actual protest um the integrity of the storytelling is intact everything is fact checked but you know we had to put these things in place in order to protect them a bit more that's incredible yeah we've been like super lucky um in that usually things like these can cost a lot of money but ryan was just so fantastic he heard about our project he he was developing kind of tools that could help mask people's identities like that because you know there are people with stories to tell but you know it could be too dangerous for them to do so when he heard about our scenes he's like hey i'm more than happy to kind of work with your budget and help you with this and we just got lucky in a way to have worked with just amazing amazing um you know people who believed in the story that we were telling and they believed that you know it was important to kind of protect people's identities i think like visual effects and changing faces and stuff it's used a lot in like big budget hollywood films but very seldom do was it used in like documentary making partially because it's not really affordable um but you know this opens up you know opportunities of telling stories that previously were too dangerous to tell and you know i'm very excited you know about that in in documentary filmmaking journalism you want it to be is kind of authentic and real and you know you can't manipulate anything right but in this case the manipulation allows you to tell the story in a way that protects the identities of your characters which is i think from the puritanical school of documentary filmmaking i hope that they would give you their blessing on it and say that yeah that's actually okay here to be honest i don't care about what they think like i think for me that you know we we did our journalism right we did our storytelling right the narrative it is their voices it is their stories and we checked everything the best we can what we are doing this is is more for protection and safety and security and i think nothing's more important than that when we're telling high-risk stories [Music] um [Music] my [Music] [Music] and what are the you know implications for the protesters or specifically the subjects of your film if they had been arrested you know what kind of um how hard is the government coming down on the protesters i mean it seems like it's pretty extreme so if you were arrested during the protests some of the lesser sentences or like the lesser charges that the protesters have been getting would be like illegal gathering and some of the more serious ones would be rioting and writing that hong kong's writing laws was a was a colonial law so it was pretty harsh and it was a law that wasn't used in a really long time and was brought back out for the protests and that could be you know i think years in prison we're talking about what has been even more dangerous um is after the um after hong kong passed the national security law in in you know july 2020 if you were charged under that it could mean life in prison and the national security law kind of kind of would outlaw you know secession terrorism and that sort of charges but it's also quite vague so no one really knows how that law will be implemented and that's kind of where it gets murky and so no one's really sure what that would mean we're only now starting to have the first cases go to court what are the you know the protesters concerns um regarding chinese surveillance during the protests they were aware that they could be monitored online which is why you know a lot of protesters hide behind kind of you know on telegram with just a username that's not tied to their real identities this is not just to protect themselves but to protect people around them and the other thing was they are aware that the police on the streets are recording the protests and have been going through footage and trying to identify protesters and arresting them afterwards you know one of the iconic things about the hong kong protests in 2019 was how people would all mask up they would wear they would be in black and they would mask up it's partially to protect their identities but in a way it's also interesting because there's a very strong sense of um that there's a belief that 20 the 2019 protests were people led it was a grassroots movement there were no leaders what they called moldai toy in cantonese which is there is no main stage there is no one group of co-leaders it's about the people and the consensus that people would reach through discussion and so in a way being anonymous or donning black masks or being faceless kind of fits into this belief that this was a people-led movement and so partially it's surveillance but it's partially also this bigger idea of what a mass movement should be like um and it you know it's a bit of both i think so what were some of the biggest challenges and obstacles you faced while making this film one of the biggest biggest challenges in making this film is um is making a narrative driven film with no faces in it i think that was the single most horrible but also maybe the best decision i had to make as a director um but and we made it quite early on once we've kind of decided on our characters i remember telling lorraine i was like um we're gonna have to make a film with no faces in it and she's like what we can't do that it's a narrative driven film we can't make a documentary film a feature-length documentary film about people with no people in it and then i just told her you know what we have to because we need to protect them we need to make it work so scott and i spent a lot of time scott my my cinematographer and i spent a lot of time thinking about how were we going to frame them in the interviews so that each of the characters would stand out as a person despite not being able us not being able to show you who they are and i think in the long run it was the right decision to make because now if we would have shown all their faces the risk would just be too high maybe we wouldn't be able to show the film at all but then it's also one of the best decisions i think that i made because it really fits into this concept of a nameless and faceless movement we are talking about people who don't want to be famous they don't need to be famous they want to be part of a generation or want to be part of a movement and i feel like in a way we're giving homage to that we are saying that maybe these stories are stories of a few individuals but that could speak for a bigger group of people you know their stories are personal but at the same time they could be stories around perhaps you or in other places where we've seen kind of social movements and these are people that we could also know and be in our lives and these could also be their hopes and their dreams [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] though junetel i felt like unexpectedly emotional at times as i was getting pulled into the lives of these kind of anonymous protesters which i was not expecting at all when i started watching the film i mean that's great to hear because i think that is one of those reasons why we made this film we wanted to go beyond the headlines you know like um there was so much news on hong kong in 2019 and even in 2020 there was so it you know stuff about hong kong was bombarding had you know international media it was everywhere but then at some point i think what was lost was kind of the more personal stories the the people behind these things because they were anonymous it's just so easy to kind of paint them all as like one big group of people in black you know it stops being personal and and and what i really wanted to do what we really wanted to do is tell you kind of the motivations behind it and you know this film was made for an international audience it's made by hong kongers but it's for an international audience we wanted to kind of frame parts of our history so that people can understand why 2019 happened and also why were people on the streets what were they fighting for and you know there are personal motivations but there is also this idea that they they wanted to take part in in whatever how they wanted to put to take part in society they want to be part of it i think that's super important these stories here me foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] it was amazing to see that kind of behind the scenes of how the hong kong protests operated which makes a lot of sense that's how they were able to sustain it for so long with so much support yeah i think there were rumors that the cia kind of ran the show and then there were also rumors that there were other players involved but you know i i was there and reporting on all of this myself and and i didn't know anyone who who did it because they received money from a foreign actor we're talking about a generation who are very tech savvy who are very comfortable in the online world and also you marry that with kind of the hong kong hong kongers are very kind of entrepreneurial in that way they're going like oh how can i make this work how can i put this together you know we're a finance you know we're a finance hub there are lots of these things that kind of went into it people are very pragmatic they go like okay if people are protesting on the streets every day if i'm a banker what can i do oh yeah i can give them money i'm going to like organize these packages i'm going to buy these things up so there's a phrase also doing the protest that was really cool it's it's it basically says that everyone has a part to play it doesn't really matter how much you give in a way because everyone can can you know give in a different way like [Music] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Music] germany [Music] when you were on the ground in the front lines filming did you ever have to retreat for your own personal safety so when when i was filming on the front lines or when my team um we have a few members of the team who are on the ground all the time there were multiple times when we had to retreat or we had to i had to say like no we need to get out of there and one of the stories i can tell is during some of the it was in the latter part of the film during the polyu the polytechnic university siege my assistant director of photography stanley um long and i we were paired up we were filming there and and things were getting quite bad the police were coming in and they were about to kind of seal off the whole school there was a lot of different messages being you know on tv saying that you know the police are saying that they they would consider using live rounds live bullets to clear the crowds if the chaos continues and then they were demanding that reporters and journalists to leave and so things were getting very dangerous so i made a call at the time that stanley and i should leave there were a few different reasons first of all we were an independent team we didn't have a news organization backing us up so if anything happened to us we were on our we would be on our own um and secondly also because stanley is a is a local um kind of cinematographer and journalist who's in his twenties and he's also kind of like the prime group of people that would get stopped and searched and arrested just because you know he's in that age group and so um we decided to leave and i still remember just walking through the rubble in the only way we could leave and the police were shining these lights at us and just saying like hands up hands up and we literally had to walk out with both our arms up like this we couldn't they wouldn't let us film they wouldn't let us do anything and they pat us down and they harassed stanley and they were very mean to him and i was very very nervous i was so worried that he was going to get arrested he had footage on him and like like we thankfully were able to get out but you know that was the time i was i was glad that we we pulled out because if we would have stayed i really didn't know what would happen [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] police are warning that they will use live rounds if they need to to contain the crowds my whole team everyone has gotten hurt during the protests scott um got shot in the knee with a rubber bullet i think and you know stanley he was sprayed by kind of water cannon laced with pepper some sort of pepper solution so it really burned your skin it was blue in color and so it was covered in this blue dye the camera was covered in blue dye and he was trying to protect the camera it was horrible and and you know crystal my assistant director was also has been shot a couple of times and i've been shot a couple of times by tear gas canisters and stuff so everyone got hurt there were moments where we had to pull back and and it really is down to the experience of the team and also kind of our person who was watching over us while we were out filming we always had a person who's in a safe place in contact with everyone making sure that you know we can be as safe as possible so that was also very important before we started rolling on this interview we were talking a bit about this political awakening that happened in recent years with this younger generation that was involved with the protests which after being almost taught to be a political growing up could you speak to that a little bit and is that something that you wanted to you know get across in the film of this kind of transfer generate intergenerational transformation that's happening within hong kong i think political awakening is relatively new in in hong kong i think throughout the cologne the british colonial era um hong kongers were quite apolitical and and i think that the colonial government has kept it that way so it's that there's less trouble you know people are not they're not they don't ask for rights they are quite happy and content with what they have and i was kept that way so i think things really changed after 1997 in the handover because um i think hong kong by you know at 1997 is now was became part of china again um and i think hong kongers since then have been looking for a space that they could call their own there's a there's a new generation who grew up not under the british but in like a new system you know under the hong kong sar government and i think there's that soul-searching that went on like the people going like so who are we you know who do we belong to and what you know what are our relationship with the city so i think a lot of the younger folks feel a sense of belonging to hong kong that maybe it was different from the previous generations i would say that hong kong's kind of the earlier kind of pro-democracy movement started in the 1980s and that has to do with the tiananmen square massacre because in 1989 june 4th there's a group of students in beijing chinese students who wanted democracy for china and they were brutally crushed that really resonated with hong kongers hong kong saw that as like wow what's going on there you know what about us what's going to happen to us once we become part of china that was i think the first wave of hong kongers who became a bit more political but then again you know it kind of died down because you know hong kong was doing well economically everyone was making money china seemed to be opening up as well but then you have the next generation that is looking at politics and saying like hey we want to be part of that and and so i think there is there is a stronger sense of belonging in community that has really pushed this awakening i think it was spectacular to see in 2019 but it wasn't sudden it took 20 years 30 years of building up to that and you know it would probably take days for us to talk about how it became like that but um how did we get to this part [Music] [Music] foreign uh oh [Music] so what did the the protests end up achieving and where did they fall short i think it's really difficult for me to objectively say whether i think the protests achieved anything or not i think that remains to be seen if you just look at facts or figures then of course the protests didn't achieve any of you know the demands that they that the protesters wanted there is no democracy things have actually moved backwards protests are no longer allowed demonstrations are no longer allowed so in a way it's gotten even worse and that has been the argument for some people saying that you know what if people didn't go overboard in 2019 we wouldn't be in such horrible shape in terms of you know we've lost a lot of freedom of expression the freedom of speech it's been a lot more difficult to express any opinion that's different from the official line um you know it's gotten worse but then i think you know no one predicted that the protests were gonna happen in the first place people had given up people but before 2019 there was a sentiment in hong kong where people just went like yeah you know we tried to do that whole umbrella movement mass protesting in 2014 that failed so you know i think that's it and then it was surprising when 2019 came along and you know just millions on the streets saying no to the extradition bill and then asking for democracy no one predicted that [Music] foreign i ended the film with these beautiful pictures of hong kong of daily life and stuff in a way that was the bit where i kind of put a bit more of my own personal feelings in i don't know what's going to happen in hong kong i don't know what the protests have achieved but i do believe that everyone still remembers the hong kong that we all love and and the reason why people fight and it's that those daily moments the places that we love um the people that we love the communities that we've built i think there are many different ways of con continuing those things and who knows what's going to happen in the future take off your journalist hat for a moment in your filmmaker hat and don't worry about giving me an objective opinion on if the protests achieved or succeeded give me your subjective view on how you feel after these protests it's been a tough two years since the protests ended um i think coupled with covert i think covert just damped dampened everything and covert became a really good excuse to kind of make sure no one is out on the streets protesting maybe not an excuse maybe it's a you know maybe it's legitimate people shouldn't be gathering in huge crowds on the streets i i do feel bleak sometimes um seeing how you know the changes that has rolled into place since then for example there's a newspaper in hong kong called apple daily it's been kind of basically forced to close down there were editors and you know the founder of the paper they were all arrested and quite a few of them are still in prison awaiting trial that has really clamped down on press freedom people are worried about the education system there's a lot of changes to the education system there's an introduction of a new subject it has to do with like national education i do feel sad and a bit depressed sometimes but i i think i was glad to have witnessed the protests because that made me believe that hong kongers do care hong kong always came across as a very kind of a place that was obsessed with money-making people are more interested in money than people it's all about business it's all about making money it's all about millionaires and beautiful cars and stuff like that it's very materialistic but i think what 2019 taught me was that i was wrong about my city there are lots of people who do care and and there were enough people to make this big deal and to voice their opinions and i often kind of think back on that and try to hold on to that despite things being depressing well i appreciate you giving me an honest and personal answer to the that question because i was just trying to imagine what it was like for for people because it has to be incredibly daunting to be fighting for the rights you used to have that are slowly disappearing and vanishing in the independence whatever autonomy hong kong had before and you're dealing with the the chinese state at the same time i mean looking into the does it create a level of hopelessness for people within the protesting community or does it give them you know even more of a fire in their bellies that we have to continue this fight i do think that right now the protests um have definitely gone underground in a way that no one no one is out on the streets protesting i don't think that's possible right now and i do think that there's a very strong sense of hopelessness which is why people are leaving there's so many people who have completely no more faith in the system or in what can be achieved here they have to leave they they have no trust in in in how um kind of this place will be run and so they need to go um i know people who are leaving because of their children they're worried about how like what kind of education their kids are gonna get so they prefer being overseas where there's a bit more freedom or like they where they think that they can trust the education system a bit more i don't know if there is any more fight right now to be very honest in what can be done in hong kong i mean it kind of feels like it's a fight that can't be won almost like maybe it is time to just raise the white flag and surrender although i don't think that's what's gonna happen i'm not an expert on it at all but i just don't you know but i don't see how you could win this fight see i i i i always don't like questions um about you know predicting what's gonna happen like what do you think is gonna happen what do you think should should be you know and like what's your opinion and what's gonna happen in the next 10 years like these are you know i think they're quite pointless in terms of we can never really predict right you know no one thought the arab spring would happen yeah no one thought that syria would be the country to be plunged into chaos because it was one of the most uh stable countries in the middle east back then so we can't predict all we can do is look at what's going on now in our societies and say like right what should we be focusing on what do we care about we could just do what we can now i try to focus on that personally but also as a journalist what can i truthfully report on what can i do an honest piece about how can i tell the stories from the ground to whoever would listen what's missing in the media about hong kong at the moment [Music] in [Music] day [Music] [Music] be [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] somewhere so one one thing that's actually really kind of amazing is that the the protesters in hong kong have changed the playbook of protesting and you know the the blm movement here um or globally at this point took a lot of cues from the the organizational prowess of the um the protest in hong kong and i think that's actually a huge gift to the you know protesting uh community around the world it evolved protesting in a way i've been amazed at how how resourceful people in hong kong are and i think it's really amazing that that has inspired a whole new generation of of you know community organizing um and kind of how social movements can be like i think technology has really played a part in in the hong kong movement and i think it will continue to play an important part in the future but i do also think that governments and states will will now start to counter that because they know that is going to be the the new battlefield like what's happening online and how that translates into mass movements so i think there might be more surveillance which actually it's already happening that has become like you know with covert as well there has been more surveillance in place everywhere around the world and so i think it'll be interesting to see how everything plays out after when you know when covert dies down a little bit more and some things might start again it'll be interesting to kind of kind of look at how social movements have changed right foreign [Applause] foreign foreign foreign [Music] has been kind of like a once in a lifetime experience i'm a first-time director so i've never done this before and actually a lot of people on the team this has been also their first tries so scott clottworthy my um my director of photography he's he's a brilliant camera man he's worked for many international broadcasters but this is his very first feature-length documentary film sam who's our editor in america it's also his very first time editing a feature length documentary film so this film is made by a group of people who this is our first time um and it's been incredibly difficult um but also super rewarding has the film screened in hong kong china the uk and what kind of reaction has it received we screened faceless at the edinburgh international film festival um earlier in the year we were quite sold out and it was i think we got some pretty good feedback from it we're not screening in hong kong we're also not screening in china for security reasons um and also i don't think we would be allowed to screen in hong kong because of the political um sensitivities here i remember speaking to an audience and in the audience there was a uh there was a woman from turkey and then there was someone from sudan and there was someone from lebanon and all of them told me a similar thing was like i watch this film it's about a part of the world that i know very little about yeah i thought the stories could happen in my own country the lebanese lady um said you know things in lebanon are bad and the people are struggling to hold on it was she's like it's heart-wrenching to watch what's going on in hong kong but somehow she felt this comfort saying that it's it's interesting it's it's great not not great but it's it's comforting to see that there is another community somewhere in the world that are going through some similar things and it was a very similar sentiment from the woman from turkey and the man from sudan and i was really touched by that that the film was able to kind of transcend just you know the news and you know hong kong it's connecting with people who are feeling oppressed or who understand and know oppression and that for me was was amazing that i get to kind of have have those interactions was that what you were hoping audiences would take away from it when you were completing post on the film i hope that the audience can watch this film and they would want to know more about hong kong they would want to ask the question so what's going on now let me just like go home and google this like what's going on now i'm not seeing it in the news i'm hoping that they would go back and then talk to their family and friends like hey i just saw this film about hong kong do you know this happened i hope that it would it would encourage the audience to look a little bit more into this little place in asia and kind of learn a bit more about that i want people to be able to transcend almost the cultural and geographical barriers and be able to see them as people and i think that that would be amazing if people come away with that because i do think that a lot of the things that the characters in the film were fighting for are universal they wanted freedom they wanted you know freedom of expression they wanted to protect their rights some of them are basic human rights the right to um and you know a basic political right so the right to vote the right to kind of take part in their government so these are universal and i hope these things connected with the audience the police have cordoned it off there is no way in no way out they have told protesters inside the university that they must surrender [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] come on go go if you could just tell me a little bit about how life has changed in hong kong after the protests in 2019 from then until now how his life changed like i think the protests stopped quite abruptly in 2020 and a large part of it was due to covet hong kongers are terrified of covert because we had a history of sars we had a history of you know being hit by stars pretty badly in twin in 2003. so everything just closed down people stopped protesting and then quite soon afterwards there were restrictions on gathering and stuff what made also a huge difference was the national security laws the law itself is is quite vague and abstract so no one really knows how is it going to be implemented and that has a chilling effect definitely because now under the national security law it bans secession terrorism and a bunch of those things the penalty could be life in prison and so the stakes are really high i think the protests have definitely gone underground if not completely stopped does it mean that people are fine with what's going on um probably not hong kongers have a great sense of humor you can always when something happens you can always see memes pop up people would say certain things and and it's usually quite dry and sarcastic so the government has also spoken up about you know cracking down on on on what people say on social media um and they have definitely started doing that and so that also casts a sense of fear in society legal suffering resist legal oppression actually though [Music] [Applause] [Applause] okay [Applause] yeah i think in the past often you have foreign film crews going into these different cultures and trying to tell someone else's story and people go back and they get these awards you know no one really cared about what happened afterwards or like how this film might have kind of impacted that local community i'm from this community i'm not going to do that my loyalty is to the people who've given me their stories my responsibilities make to make sure that i protect them and i think documentary making needs to evolve in that way that it's not about the filmmaker really it's really about the people that is in the film it's their story um and i need to stay true to that and if it and if it means that you know i need to break certain rules in order to protect them that's you know probably that rule shouldn't be there in the first place i think it's a it's really an important film and that's why we wanted to include it as part of our season for the short list and it's fascinating and you know congratulations to you and scott and your whole team as first-time filmmakers you know we're excited to get this out into the world i'm grateful that we have this opportunity to be part of you know this program um on vice and have people watch this and i'm very excited to kind of see what people think jennifer thank you so much really appreciate your time and i hope that we could nice meeting you yeah hopefully we can meet in real life at some point please stay in touch [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: VICE

Views: 482,479

Keywords: documentary, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, film, short films, movies, hong kong, hong kong protests, hong kong news, umbrella movement, hong kong riots 2019, hong kong extradition bill, hong kong democracy, hong kong protests vice, hong kong protests news, hong kong police, hong kong demonstrations, hong kong protesters, what happened

Id: j5YKKPizQi8

Length: 147min 21sec (8841 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022