It
is eerily fitting that Hong Kong’s democracy activists chose the umbrella as
their symbol. After all, they are now most definitely facing that proverbial
rainy day. Aside from our colleagues at the Epoch
Times, the largely AWOL American media did a terrible job of covering the
Umbrella Protests. In contrast, HK filmmaker Flora Lau was there, capturing the
images of a movement that deserved better in the brief but potent short, I Am Hong Kong, which screens during the
2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Based
on her unusually subtle and nuanced narrative feature debut Bends, Lau will be a filmmaker to be
reckoned with, assuming I Am Hong Kong does
not cause her bureaucratic trouble down the line. Her approach for the short is
elegantly simple, matching striking black-and-white stills with voiceovers from
diverse protestors explaining what contemporary Hong Kong means to them, in
either practical or metaphorical terms.
These
are the faces we have not seen—the mothers with young children, the senior
citizens, and the attractive young college students, who surely would have had plenty
of other requests for their time, were they not demonstrating for meaningful
democratic reforms. Indeed, their signs are quite telling, proclaiming “No
party, no karaoke, fight for democracy,” and “Keep calm and carry an umbrella.”
