“This movement will go on forever, since the world will always remain unjust,” says an activist interviewed in Evans Chan’s We Have Boots (2020), a documentary tracking the various waves of the pro-democracy protests that have taken over Hong Kong in recent years. Watching the new non-fiction films included in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s ‘Ordinary Heroes’ strand—made across a number of years and dealing with different aspects of the protests—viewers received a striking sense of how the tensions have developed in such a short space of time, as well as the social and economic conditions that have informed them. As well as showing how the protests have progressed, the films also display a change in the mentality of those involved. Smaller-scale and mostly student-led in 2014, five years later the protests look radically different. 2 million citizens took to the streets for one assembly in 2019, and police unleashed more than 1000 canisters of tear gas at protestors in a single day on another. Similarly, a movement that seemed naive and somewhat unsure of itself in 2014, looks, in 2019, like an agile, organised collective body, moving, like the Bruce Lee mantra they have adopted, ’like water’. Beyond all of this though, the films convey the challenges of effectively documenting a revolution that is developing daily: a leaderless mass movement that seems to have clean divides (‘pro-democracy’ vs ‘pro-Beijing’) and clear objectives (“FIVE DEMANDS, NOT ONE LESS!”), yet despite this, has no foreseeable end in sight.”
Read full article on the Hong Kong Ordinary Heroes strand at IFFR on Sight & Sound
