A strange week for me, and quite the rubbish week for Hong Kong!

  

A reminder (from a member of the Yellow Economic Circle) 

that self care is important

 

This has been a bit of a strange week for me.  One evening saw me so very upset by something I read that I could feel my blood pressure rising, my actually feeling hot in the head and my hands literally shaking.  Another saw me feeling reflective and depressed post viewing a film looking at traumatic family experiences and how their effects are felt for decades.  And a third had me so affected by a late night discussion about what's been lost in Hong Kong in recent years that I ended up literally having a dream in which I detailed to my mother all the the things about pre national security law Hong Kong that I now miss so much.

 

Hence my not having been in the right frame of mind to do any blogging.  And all this while, life goes on and events like the national security law trial of Jimmy Lai continue to take place; with this week seeing the first witness for the prosecution take the stand.  Here's the thing though: I can't quite figure out from the reports what Cheung Kim-hung, the former publisher of the now-defunct Apple Daily, has said of his former boss that is actually incriminating!

For example, on Wednesday, Cheung said of his old boss that "“Mr. Lai has a very clear image. He advocates for democracy, freedom, and opposes totalitarianism".  Doesn't that sound more like an endorsement and praise than condemnation?  Also, what's illegal about that?!

 

Cheung also "said Lai, in 2019, told his senior editorial staff that the government proposal to amend the city’s extradition arrangement was an “infringement of Hongkonger’s democracy, freedom and human rights,” and the Chinese Communist Party would use the amendment to send “thorns in their side” to stand trial in the mainland."  Again, what's wrong and illegal about that?

 

And there's this: “Mr. Lai’s instruction was to use Apple Daily to encourage people to take to the street, to put up resistance [against the government],” Cheung said."  A reminder: not all street protests are illegal; especially those which are non-violent and got letters of no objection from the police -- which was the case with the vast majority of the anti-extradition bill and pro-democracy protest marches and rallies that took place in 2019, the year that Jimmy Lai gave those instructions.

 

As for this: "On the international level, Mr. Lai wanted to draw the attention from western democratic countries, hoping that they would offer some help, even some stronger measures such as placing sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials.”  Again, this doesn't sound illegal or criminal to me.  Especially before China's imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong on June 30th, 2020!

In all honesty, much of what's going on these days doesn't seem to make much sense to me at all.  A case in point: the waste tax fiasco that had much of Hong Kong in uproar in recent days.  As Ming Pao journalist Alvin Lum noted, only partly -- even if actually -- in jest, "Forget about Article 23. The biggest challenge for officials might be waste charging"!

 

Another crazy thing that happened in Hong Kong this week: the M+ museum being made to not mention the name of a film that they nonetheless were allowed to screen.  (For the record: it was Beijing Bastards, a 1993 drama directed by Zhang Yuan!) Prompting the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers' spokesperson, Tenky Tin, to ask the entirely valid question: “From the point of view of a regular filmgoer, one has to wonder, how can you sell tickets for a film without disclosing its name?"!

 

Even more disturbingly, this week also saw the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) withdraw its support for an annual drama awards ceremony, citing “inappropriate” arrangements last year and warning the organisers they must not breach the law; resulting in the Hong Kong Federation of Drama Societies (HKFDS) – which organises the Hong Kong Drama Awards -- not only losing its subsidy from the government advisory body but, also, being denied a venue to stage it after the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) also told the drama federation that it would not be offering a venue for the event this year!

 

Rather than accept the HKADC's decision though, the HKFDS actually decided to publicly challenge it!  On Friday morning, the HKFDS's chairperson, Luther Fung , called a press conference to “defend the theatre industry’s dignity.”  In response to the HKADC's objections to two of last year's awards presenters having been  political cartoonist Wong Kei-kwan, known as Zunzi, and journalist Bao Choy, Fung asserted that "Zunzi is a veteran cartoonist – are cartoons not art? Choy is a documentary director – are documentaries not art?"

 

Addressing the HKADC, he said: ""You made an official decision without giving us a chance to defend ourselves, and that came as a shock to us,”... adding that there had been no official meetings between the council and the federation over the funding issue.  “We demand a clarification, and for accusations to be retracted — we will not file a so-called appeal,” said Fung. “[We’re] poor, but we have a backbone!”"

 

To which I say "kudos"!  And long may Hong Kongers have backbones and not be as easily bullied as the bullies might think and hope!

Hong Kong International Film Festival ticketing and other woes!

Waiting in line to buy Hong Kong International Film Festival 

tickets even before the booking counter opened!

 

The 48th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) was originally scheduled to run between March 31st and April 11th this year.  But as a result of tightened pandemic measures being enforced from January 7th through to late April in response to Hong Kong's fifth and thus far worst Covid wave, the decision was made to postpone it to the summer -- with the hope that it wouldn't suffer the fate of the 2020 edition of the fest, which was originally postponed to the summer but then ended up being cancelled entirely.

 

Despite daily Covid case numbers being above the 4,000 mark (and thus higher than any day in 2020 or 2021) though, the 2022 HKIFF does look like it will be going ahead (touch wood!); with the fest's full line-up being announced last week; and ticketing for it beginning today for the fest that's now due to take place between August 15th to 31st.  And like in many a previous year, I spent a good amount of time in the days in between the line-up announcement and the opening of ticketing for the fest perusing the fest program and figuring out what film screenings I wanted to go to!

 

This morning, I woke up extra early to make sure that I'd be among the first in line at an URBTIX counter to purchase my HKIFF tickets.  Despite my arriving at my destination close to half an hour before the counter opened and ticketing began, I found -- to my dismay -- that there were 10 people already in line there!  And worse was to come as I discovered that each person being served (at the three counters at the venue) were taking an average of 30 minutes or so to complete their purchases!

 

Thus it was that I ended up spending over 2 hours standing in line before I could make my bookings; at which point, five of the screenings that I had wanted to buy tickets for were already fully booked!  Adding to the pain: that five included screenings to ever single one of the Hong Kong films I had wanted to see at this year's HKIFF (along with a classic Japanese film from 1974)!

 

For the record: the four Hong Kong films in question are Philip Yung's Where the Wind Blows (which was controversially pulled from last year's festival -- so one wonders how much censorship it has undergone to be deemed okay to be screened this year); sci fi blockbuster, Warriors of Future; Mabel Cheung's To My 19-Year-Old Self; and legal drama, The Sparring Partner.  Also for the record: critically acclaimed extradition bill protest-themed works like Kiwi Chow's Revolution of Our Times, Golden Horse winner May You Stay Forever Young and Chan Tze-woon's Blue Island are not in the fest program (and, in all likelihood, will never be allowed to be publicly screened in Hong Kong).

 

Politics aside, the biggest bug bear for many with regards to the Hong Kong International Film Festival will involve the ticketing.  In normal times, it's already a pain -- with the URBTIX website being known to crash on the first day of HKIFF ticketing as well as having a tendency to "time out" on people who want to make multiple ticket purchases (i.e., many, if not the majority of, serial HKIFF goers!).  

 

Because of my own bad experiences with the URBTIX website, I've found counter booking a more reliable way to get tickets.  But this year, even the URBTIX's own booking computers were on the slow and problem-ridden side, as the harried staffer I dealt with -- the same woman who confided to me a few years back that the first day of ticketing for the HKIFF was usually her worst work day of each year! -- told me.  Which helped to explain why each person in the line I was in was taking so long to complete their bookings.

 

It surely doesn't help that, because it was pushed from its usual schedule, the HKIFF appears to have been unable to make use of its usual screening venues, which include my favorite of the lot: the Hong Kong Cultural Centre's +1,700 seater Grand Theatre.  Put another way: I doubt that any of this year's HKIFF screening venues have anything approaching as large a capacity as it even before social distancing regulations further cut down the number of seats allowed to be sold for each HKIFF screening.

 

One nice thing about this year's HKIFF ticketing though is that I didn't have to go to different venues to buy tickets; unlike in previous years.  Centralization of ticket sales is good -- at least theoretically.  But, alas, it might have further strained the system today!    

 

Ah well, I hope that the films I got tickets for all prove watchable, if not stellar!  And this especially since, like with last year's Hong Kong International Film Festival but unlike the years previously, all I have to look forward to as far as the fest is concerned are the films themselves rather than meet ups with old film friends coming from other parts of the world -- since I very much doubt that any of them are planning to come over to Hong Kong thanks to it being one of the few territories in the world which still require people to undergo several nights of hotel quarantine upon arrival as a result of it still officially pursuing a (Dynamic) Covid Zero strategy!