TEN YEARS

十年

Directed by Ng Ka-leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai, Fei-Pang Wong, Kwok Zune

Asia Pop! / Hong Kong / 2015 / Drama / 104 mins / Cantonese, Mandarin with English subtitles / DCP

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TEN YEARS

UltraStar Mission Valley
Monday, November 7, 2016 5:35 pm

TEN YEARS

UltraStar Mission Valley
Wednesday, November 9, 2016 5:30 pm

Description

Best Film, 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards
Film of Merit, 2015 Hong Kong Film Critics Society Award
Official Selection, 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival

The disjointed experience of time is one of the great themes of Hong Kong cinema. And so it should be no surprise that the most important and talked-about Hong Kong film of the decade is a work of speculative fiction that looks at present anxieties through a fear for the future. Specifically, TEN YEARS is five short films, each by a different director, that imagines Hong Kong ten years from 2015, a year that saw the thawing and taming of the democratic Umbrella Movement the year before. The 2025 of these short films is chilling, numbing, frustrating, infuriating, and energizing. If buying a movie ticket is a kind of voting, then the box office success of TEN YEARS is proof that Hong Kongers crave a voice.

The young directors of the segments are also proof that Hong Kong cinema has a bold and promising future. One short is a thriller about political corruption and assassination. Another reflects on the meaning of preservation in the context of political and social loss. Jevons Au (Trivisa) tells the absurdist tale of a taxi driver who can’t speak the Beijing-imposed Mandarin dialect. Chow Kun-wai’s documentary-esque short imagines the political protest to come: conflicting strategies, inter-ethnic alliance, self-immolation. The fifth piece imagines the future through past horrors: the youth of Hong Kong are indoctrinated as Red Guards who rat out any reference to local identity. TEN YEARS may not be subtle in its ideology, but it does political filmmaking right: by harnessing its passion to loudly portray the complexity of Hong Kong’s skepticism. –Brian Hu