The Hong Kong International Film Festival's younger, smaller and seasonal sibling, the Summer International Film Festival, began earlier this week -- but it is by no means the entertainment-related talk of the town in Hong Kong. Instead, that (dubious) credit goes to Australian actress Nicole Kidman having been allowed to skip quarantine when coming to town -- to film an Amazon Prime series about privileged expatriates in Hong Kong that had already been derided by many Hong Kongers.
Actually, this news has been reported internationally too (see here and here and here for starters). And the Hong Kong government has only fanned the flames of indignation, in its distinctive way, by acknowledging that it had approved Kidman's quarantine exemption and sating that this should be okay because she's keeping away from Hong Kong people (prompting one wag to note that "She certainly did her research on the expat lifestyle"!) and not allowed to take any public transportation whilst in Hong Kong with a quarantine exemption!
Even before this, it's not like people were feeling positive about the Amazon Prime production that Nicole Kidman is an executive producer for and, also, may be starring in. Among other things, it didn't help that Expats' director, Lulu Wang, is the scion of privileged Chinese Communisty Party members, and seemingly unaware that Hong Kong has an established film and TV industry of its own and thus should not be the kind of place where you need to import cameras for your production! Oh, and there's also the tone-deafness of choosing to make a contemporary TV show about Hong Kong expats that doesn't look like it'll acknowledge what's been happening to Hong Kong in the past two years (like, you know, protests and repression).
If this wasn't bad enough, amazingly, Amazon has now committed to a secondly series focusing on Hong Kong expats: this one entitled Exciting Times -- and no, it doesn't seem like its title is meant to be ironic in any way -- based on a novel that rang at least one Hong Konger's alarm bells back in January of last year! This all has prompted some people to wonder if it has to do with the Hong Kong government's plans to launch an international publicity campaign to promote Hong Kong as the "best place in Asia to live, work and invest in" post its hiring global PR firm Consulum FZ LLC (Consulum) to "relaunch Hong Kong" and make its image more positive post it being sullied by such as mass arrests of pro-democracy politicians and political activists, the shutting down of the territory's largest pro-democracy newspaper and the imposition by China of a national security law for Hong Kong.
Speaking of negative Hong Kong news: yesterday saw the arrest of four University of Hong Kong undergraduates-- aged between 18 and 20 years of age -- for "advocating terrorism" (by having released a statement, which they later retracted, expressing “deep sadness” over the death of a man who had wounded a police officer this past July 1st and appreciation for his “sacrifice”); and the announcement of the imminent halting of operations of the 612 Humanitarian Fund established to help arrested Hong Kong protestors due its soon not going to have a bank account it can use.
Then today also saw two members of the Hong Kong 12, Andy Li and Chan Tsz-wah, pleading guilty in a national security law case that is linked to jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai (as a result of what some suspect torture and other pressures), and tens of thousands of Hong Kongers holding British National Overseas passports being forced to leave behind their retirement savings when they leave for the United Kingdom. And yes, I easily could have made one of these the main focus of this blog post -- and no, my not doing so doesn't mean that I think that all those happenings are not noteworthy.
The reason why I've discussed in greater detail the Nicole Kidman quarantine exemption case, though, is because I think it shows so clearly how, in contemporary Hong Kong (not just George Orwell's Animal Farm), some animals really are more equal than others. It also majorly highlights how Hong Kong's anti-pandemic measures don't seem to make complete sense if taken purely as medically-determined ones -- all of which doesn't exactly get people trusting the Hong Kong government with regards to anything, including its vaccination program. Speaking of which: isn't it interesting and/or ironic that, even while it's younger Hong Kongers who tend to be seen as virulently anti-government, the least vaccinated of Hong Kongers currently are those who are over 70 years old?!
2 comments:
Hi there,
Strange. Even a laymen like me had heard of Salon Films. In the analog years they were a local supplier of Panavision equipments.
T
Hi T --
You'd think they would have more knowledge of a place that they're filming in -- and more general respect of its local film and TV industry along with the local populace as a whole, right? But, for some time now, it really doesn't appear to be the case!
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