Chan Tze-woon’s past and future Hong Kong
IN A DUSTY INTERROGATION ROOM in Hong Kong, a younger activist is introduced in for questioning. The yr is 1967. He has been arrested for taking part in pro-Communist riots towards the British colonial regime. Throughout the desk, his captor asks: “You develop up in our colony. You examine in our colleges. So then why are you combating towards us?” Minutes later, a voice yells “Minimize,” revealing this to be a movie set in 2020. The digicam doesn’t minimize although. As a substitute, it holds regular on the face of the younger actor, an precise pupil protester in present-day Hong Kong, in an unbroken shot that elides any perceptible transition from fiction to documentary. Now there are questions posed on the protester as himself: “You had been born on Chinese language soil. Nurtured on Chinese language soil. Why do you oppose China?”
Such moments of slippage between previous and current, reenactment and actuality recur all through Blue Island, a brand new movie by director Chan Tze-woon. The work blends verité footage from the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests with archival materials and inventive restaging of historic occasions. Chan solid modern protesters to play dissidents from earlier upheavals—the 1967 labor riots in Hong Kong, the Cultural Revolution, the 1989 Tiananmen Sq. rebellion—in a course of he describes as “turning the well timed into the timeless.”
“They don’t seem to be professionals, so generally it’s painful to look at,” Chan joked about his protester-actors after we not too long ago spoke over Zoom. However imperfect appearing is exactly the purpose. Early on within the movie, Chan instructs a protester to “mission your individual experiences” onto the character of an activist in 1989 Beijing: “You might be additionally enjoying your self.” The discordanceof this intergenerational identification turns into clear in a later scene the place we hear the divergent slogans chanted on the annual June Fourth candlelight vigil, the place actual Tiananmen survivors, now middle-aged, invoke the dream of a democratic China whereas youthful attendees name for Hong Kong independence. Blue Island seeks to not reconcile these conflicting visions however fairly deliver them into relation, displaying, by way of the layered time of the reenactment, that any sense of the long run should emerge towards the nonetheless unfolding aftermath of the previous.
This temporal convolution units Chan’s work aside from different documentaries on the latest Hong Kong protests, corresponding to Revolution of Our Occasions (2021), Taking Again the Legislature (2020), Do Not Cut up (2020), and When a Metropolis Rises (2021), all of which place viewers squarely in the course of the motion of 2019–20 and proceed with the goal of bearing witness. Chan’s earlier movie Yellowing (2016), on the 2014 Umbrella Motion, hewed to an identical path. However new circumstances of protest in 2019 demanded a extra ingenious method. The intentionally faceless nature of the motion made particular person tales extremely delicate and harmful to report. In the meantime, the rise of the smartphone livestream, with protesters broadcasting in actual time, rendered the “timeliness” of the documentary picture redundant.
The broader scope of Blue Island allowed Chan to shift right into a intentionally “premature” register, to ponder how the depth of the current could cool right into a quieter historical past that lives and breathes in quotidian time. Recreations of previous struggles within the movie usually circulation into footage following the true lives of older dissidents within the current: a white-haired Cultural Revolution refugee who now routinely swims within the water that first carried him to Hong Kong; a pupil consultant within the Tiananmen protests, now a civil rights lawyer who pores over stacks of recordsdata in a cramped workplace; a leftist activist jailed in the course of the 1967 anti-colonial riots, now a profitable businessman and self-professed “patriot” of China.
Within the emotional centerpiece of the movie, the previous rioter comes face-to-face along with his younger double, a pupil protester combating for the radically totally different objective of Hong Kong independence. In a dimly lit jail cell on Chan’s movie set, suspended within the not possible area of reenactment, they converse to one another throughout generational and political rifts. “Doing time is tough, however being in the true world afterwards is even more durable,” the previous man says to the younger man, who additionally faces potential imprisonment. “Time is the best check. Time will slowly erode your beliefs.” However there’s longing in his voice. “Most of us have been deserted. In actuality, we’re simply the deserted youngsters of the riot.”
Greater than an train in melancholia, this staged encounter factors to a type of speculative historical past. If the previous man presents his previous because the younger man’s future, then the younger man’s personal imperfect efficiency of this previous opens the long run as much as various routes. Reenactment, writes movie theorist Invoice Nichols, “resurrects the previous to reanimate it with the pressure of a want,” imbuing occasions as soon as deemed sealed and finalized with new chance. At a second of post-traumatic deadlock in Hong Kong, Blue Island turns to the embodied crossings of reenactment to counsel that the previous isn’t completed, and neither is Hong Kong.
— Xueli Wang
Blue Island begins a run at New York’s Metrograph theater on July 29.
