Uneasy Transition THE CITY DOCUMENTED IN HONG KONG MOMENTS AND MANY UNDULATING THINGS
There’s a scene in the documentary Hong Kong Moments (Zhou Bing, 2020) in which Benny Yeung, a district councillor who’s been in office for twelve years, takes a taxi ride through the city. It’s 2019, so the conversation with the driver inevitably turns to the ongoing anti-government protests. It quickly becomes clear that they are on either side of Hong Kong’s intractable ideological divide: Yeung, a conservative politician; the driver identifying with the independence movement. Almost semantic disagreements between the interlocutors about who is responsible for the violence gripping the city – police or protesters – soon foment real hostility, the conversation turning from uncomfortable to heated in a blink. In the end, the driver asks the politician to stop talking; the rest of the journey takes place in uneasy silence, at a tense stalemate.
It’s a hugely symbolic sequence in a documentary that dares try to straddle the divide that, in Hong Kong in 2019, seemed like an insurmountable chasm. The protests rose up against a proposed extradition bill that would grant more political powers to mainland China and lessen the independence of local citizens;1 thus, they can be traced back through the 1997 handover to the nation’s colonial history. The divide wasn’t between just police and protester, but Chinese and Hongkonger, mainland and independence, conservative and liberal, a past generation and a new one.
Hong Kong Moments’ filmmakers wanted to counter partisan media coverage, remaining centrist in a climate that demanded side-taking. ‘Choosing to film people from the opposite standpoint, [we felt that] other films would not take that approach,’ says producer Ricky Choy. ‘The media were quite extreme in this time. Either you were pro-democracy, or you were pro-government. There was no in-between […] We wanted to be neutral.’ So the production undertook the difficult task of finding people on either side of the
