Clara Law, the Australian-based Hong Kong-born director of Rotterdam-screener Floating Life, has launched a scathing attack against China's takeover of the colony on 1 July and the apparent acquiesence of Hong Kong film makers and media. Adam Minns reports.
Law attacked China's censorship record and the possibility it would re-write basic Hong Kong laws. She highlighted how Beijing banned her 1993 production Temptation Of A Monk in China and attempted to have it withdrawn from the Internationala Film Festival of Rotterdam and the Hong Kong Film Festival.
"There's nothing that political in Temptation and until now no reason has been given why it should be banned," she said. "There's no one you can approach, its utterly faceless."
Self-censorship and hypocrisy
Law, who regularly returns to Hong Kong, accused Hong Kong's media and film industry of self-censorship and hypocrisy. "It has come to a point where I read major newspapers and I feel like I'm reading a Chinese newspaper from China," she said. "That, for me, is very frightening.
She compared Hong Kong to Czechoslakia immediately before its occupation by the Soviet Union. "There's no moral conscience," she said. "It's like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as if I am in Czechoslakia in 1968 and things are changing overnight but people are not aware of it. Or if they are, they are being part of it. It is dishonest intellectualism. They were pro-Britain, now they're pro-China."
Artistic restraints
Law maintained her permanent move to Melbourne was due to artistic restraints imposed as much by the commericialism of the colony's film makers as the imminent handover of Hong Kong. "Even if there were no handover I would still move to Australia because of the artistic growth I can have there," she said. "I feel at home there."
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