Chan Tze Woon’s award-winning hybrid-documentary Blue Island on Hong Kong’s protest movement opens for a one-week theatrical engagement at Metrograph, beginning Friday, July 29, 2022.
Winner of the Best Feature Documentary Award at HotDocs Festival 2022, the film weaves together the memories of older generations’ historical experiences with the struggles of the younger generation striving to preserve their freedom in Hong Kong.
Chan’s second feature uses elements of documentary and fictional reconstruction – including visions of the possible future – to describe the Hong Kong of today and tomorrow, a city that’s been wracked by protests against the fading of the autonomy promised by the “One Country, Two Systems” deal struck with its 1997 Handover to the People’s Republic of China.
A sui generis, boots-on-the-ground portrait of the city and its disillusioned-but-unbowed people, in which contemporary student protestors recreate the struggles of another generation, including the citywide strikes of 1967, suggesting not only the cyclical nature of history but the long deferral of revolutionary change.
“This is a story about those generations who have contemplated the nature of Hong Kong and their identities as Hongkongers, but who are depressed by their inability to shape the city’s fate. This kind of disillusionment is a universal tether that binds all of us together.” – Dir. Chan Tze Woon
Watch the trailer for Blue Island.