More agony for Hong Kongers on International Students' Day

Hong Kong is burning on the 30th anniversary

of the start of the Velvet Revolution :(

Messages on a cardboard mock-up of the Berlin Wall

erected this evening in Edinburgh Place, Hong Kong

What many Hong Kongers want

In a since superseded November protest schedule for Hong Kongers, there had been plans to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a rally at Edinburgh Place on November 9th.  But the death of Alex Chow Tsz-lok on the morning of the day before put a stop to what would have been a happy as well as peaceful protest event.  

Although Hong Kong's troubles have continued into this week -- and, in the eyes of many (including myself) actually increased in intensity and seriousness -- no such decision was made to cancel a rally at Edinburgh Place this evening to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the beginning of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution (and defacto beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe).  And while public transport problems had caused me to abandon plans to attend a rally in support of, and to praise, Hong Kong's firefighters and ambulance workers on Thursday night, I arrived in Central this evening with sufficient time to peruse the messages written and plastered on a cardboard wall that had been erected there, and even add a couple of my own!   

A few minutes after 7pm, the rally officially began with announcements, including of the main themes of today's event, in Cantonese and English (with sign language interpretation also utilized at the rally).  A video was also screened which began with a look at Eastern Europe in the years immediately after the Second World War, included film footage showing the emergence and rise of Poland's Solidarity along with the creation as well as fall of the Berlin Wall, and ended with a recap of recent events in Hong Kong.

Also shown at the event were video recordings of what took place over in Mainland China in the summer of 1989.  And it once more tore at my heart to see idealistic students with little idea of what lay ahead for them and their country on June 4th of that year as well visual documentation of the massacre that Hong Kongers have continued to commemorate and mourn even while many Mainland Chinese can't, won't or are outright ignorant about.  

Three other things compounded the agony of this evening's re-watch of the massacre of students by the People's Liberation Army 30 years ago.  First was the fact that we were doing so just meters away from the Hong Kong headquarters of the same military force under the absolute control of the Chinese Communist Party.  Second was the same People's Liberation Army having ventured out into the streets of Hong Kong yesterday afternoon for what was clearly a propaganda stunt that I sincerely hope that the vast majority of Hong Kongers can see through (and thus react to with horror).  

Most upsetting of all was that midway through this evening's events, participants were sharing images posted online of Hong Kong Polytechnic University in flames (on the evening of what happens to be International Students' Day) and messages of the Hong Kong police having threatened the protesters there with the use of lethal force, resulting in an exodus of a good portion of the rally's crowd -- presumably to head over to try to help out the beleaguered protesters over across Victoria Harbour.  In all honesty, this was one of those occasions when one gets incredibly tempted to cease being a wo lei fei (peaceful, rational, non-violent) protester and one could sense the frustration and shame of people who elected to stay at Edinburgh Place and be so.  

A friend visiting from Germany invoked the protests led by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King last night as examples of successful non-violent movements and why Hong Kong protesters should eschew violence.  But when I asked her if she thought Gandhi or King would have been successful against the Nazis, she fell silent.  

And yes, I know that it can seem like a cheap shot to some to compare Communist China to the Nazis.  On the other hand, one can't deny that Communist Chinese leaders have been responsible for a whole lot of atrocities and deaths, including of democracy-seeking university students and their supporters at Tiananmen Square.  Also, it can't be too much exaggeration to state that, after what happened over at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on Tuesday, people have good reason to fear that the Communist China-backed Hong Kong police may carry out their version of the Tiananmen Square massacre at Hong Kong Polytechnic University tonight. :(   

Blindness requires leaps of faith to fully enlighten (film review)

Seek and ye shall find?

Blindness (Poland, 2016)

- Screening as part of the HKIFF's Auteurs program

- Ryszard Bugajski, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Maria Mamona, Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, Jansuz Gajos, Marek Kalita

A confession: I had not seen any of Polish auteur Ryszard Bugajski's films prior to checking out his speculative drama about a real-life Stalinist era government interrogator.  Still, I had heard about his critically acclaimed The Interrogation, which was made in 1982 but banned by the Polish government until after the disintegration of the Soviet bloc seven years later, and is infamous for what its lead character (and actress, who went on to win the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1990) was put through.

Although Blindness switches the focus from tortured to torturer, I must admit to expecting to have to sit through a similar amount of visually punishing scenes.  This time around though, my sense is that the pain is often much more mental than physical, and sometimes even imagined rather than real too -- with the film's lead character, a middle-aged woman who has a variety of aliases as well as nicknames (including "Bloody Luna"), now coming across more like a victim-to-be rather than someone with the upper hand, and a whip in that hand to boot.

One day in 1962, Julia Prajs Brystgier (who's portrayed by the director-writer's real-life spouse, Maria Mamona) goes to a facility in the country maintained by the Catholic church to seek a meeting with the Primate (Mareka Kalita), Poland's most senior clergyman.  An atheist -- or at least agnostic -- Jew, she nonetheless professes to seek salvation through Christianity, wanting dearly to emerge from the darkness after realizing how blind she had been to such as Communism's failings and the wrongs she herself committed in its name earlier on in her life.  

At what turns out to be a center for the (physically) blind, Julia first meets up with Sister Benedicta (Malgorzata Zajackowska), a Jewish convert to Catholicism, and Father Ciecorka (Jansuz Gajos), a priest blinded by former colleagues of Julia, who -- as her Bloody Luna nickname attests -- drew quite a bit of blood and induced pain when she worked for Poland's notorious Ministry of Public Security.  The conversations she has with them -- and also, eventually, the Primate -- provide an interesting window into her tortured soul. 

They may feel on the stagey side but the at times political, sometimes metaphysical one-on-one discussions that Julia has with these other strong personalities alternately intrigue and educate.  In contrast, the film's dramatic stagings of certain events from Julia's damnable past and hallucinatory imagination tended, to my mind, to confuse matters and over-complicate the story.  In particular, the inclusion in the work of a torture victim who had identified himself as Jesus Christ looked to have overly-mystified things and made it all harder to believe.

Even while I understand that a filmmaker has artistic license to be imaginative, it seems to me that in the case of someone like Julia Brystgier, there needed to be few embellishments to make her story an arresting one.  Actually, after reading about this personality post viewing the film, the sense I got was that if Blindness had depicted more of what actually is known about her and her deeds, it'd actually disturb and devastate more.  As it was, like with Oliver Laxe's also religious-themed Mimosas (which I viewed earlier on in the Hong Kong International Film Festival), its scenes that required leaps of faith tended to lose rather than enlighten me.
  
My rating for the film: 6.0