Hong Kong directors defend success of Ten Years
Filmmakers respond to criticism after taking top prize, saying creating platform to discuss city’s future is more important than any award
The voting mechanism for the Hong Kong Film Awards has come under scrutiny amid criticism that the awards have been politicised, following Ten Year’s winning of the top film honour.
The directors of the Ten Years, which won Best Film on Sunday, said on Tuesday that the movie was a project to encourage Hong Kong people to start thinking about the future of the city. Having created the platform for discussions on this matter is more important than the prize, they said.
“If a movie deliberately tries to avoid talking about politics, that in itself is a political movie,” said Ng Ka-leung, one of the movie’s five directors.
Ten Years won the Best Film prize on Sunday after two rounds of voting, according to the awards’ web site.
In the first round, a group of 100 professional adjudicators contribute to 50 per cent of the votes, with the other half of the votes going to registered voters in the film industry.
The five movies with the highest score will enter the second round of election. In that round, 55 per cent of votes came from a panel of 55 professional adjudicators. The rest of the 45 per cent came from members from 14 film associations, including the Hong Kong Film Arts Association and the Hong Kong Film Directors’ Guild.
Shu Kei, a filmmaker and chairman of the school of film and television at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, said Ten Years won the top honour through a “democratic” process because the prize was not awarded by the organiser of the awards.
“It was chosen after two rounds of elections by open ballot, a responsible way of election,” he wrote on his Facebook.
Shu made the remarks after Peter Lam Kin-ngok, chairman of production company Media Asia, said immediately after Sunday’s ceremony that “politics has kidnapped the profession and politicised film awards”.
Ten Years is a dystopian movie consisting of five short films with heavy socio-political undertones. As the name suggests, it posits what the city will be like in 2025.
The movie consists of five short films, produced by five directors. In one of them, the death of a young hunger striker protesting for independence prompts a sympathetic old woman to set herself on fire in the first self-immolation incident in the city. Hong Kong people’s fear of and alienation from the motherland are on full display throughout the film.
The movie grabbed headlines after Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times slammed it for being “absurd” and “pessimistic”. Mainland media made no mention of the movie when they reported the winners of the Hong Kong Film Awards.
The movie’s director Chow Kwun-wai said the low-budget movie was produced because the five of them wanted Hong Kong people to think about the future of the city.
“The most important thing is that we have opened up a platform to discuss the future of Hong Kong. That is more meaningful than winning the award,” he added.
On whether the movie deserved the top picture prize when it had not been nominated in any other categories such as Best Effects or Best Actor, Chow said this was “normal” because the movie was made up of five short films.