Edited by Leiya Lee

Notes on Contributors

Felix Tsang (Golden Scene) is the executive producer of Ten Years (2015) and producer of the Ten Years International Project.

Dr Leiya Lee earned his PhD in Film Studies from Kingston University London in 2017. He is currently working in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Hong Kong. His main interest centres around using time travel as a model to understand moving images: narration and spectatorship, film history, and even theory. He has also worked as sound engineer and music composer in the past.

Edited by Leiya Lee

Notes on Contributors

Andrew Choi is the executive producer of Ten Years (2015).

Dr Leiya Lee earned his PhD in Film Studies from Kingston University London in 2017. He is currently working in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Hong Kong. His main interest centres around using time travel as a model to understand moving images: narration and spectatorship, film history, and even theory. He has also worked as sound engineer and music composer in the past.

Edited by Leiya Lee

Notes on Contributors

Kwai-Cheung Lo is the Director of the Creative and Professional Writing Programme at the Baptist University of Hong Kong.

Dr Leiya Lee earned his PhD in Film Studies from Kingston University London in 2017. He is currently working in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Hong Kong. His main interest centres around using time travel as a model to understand moving images: narration and spectatorship, film history, and even theory. He has also worked as sound engineer and music composer in the past.

Edited by Leiya Lee

Notes on Contributors

Professor Laikwan Pang works in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Dr Leiya Lee earned his PhD in Film Studies from Kingston University London in 2017. He is currently working in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Hong Kong. His main interest centres around using time travel as a model to understand moving images: narration and spectatorship, film history, and even theory. He has also worked as sound engineer and music composer in the past.

Conducted, recorded, edited and subtitled by Leiya Lee

Interviewees:

• Ka-leung Ng is the director of the “Local Egg” segment and Ten Years (2015), and the producer of Ten Years (2015)
• Andrew Choi: producer of Ten Years (2015) and Ten Years International Project
• Felix Tsang from Golden Scene is the international distributor of Ten Years and of Ten Years International Project and the producer of Ten Years International Project
• Lorraine Ma is the producer of Ten Years International Project

Notes on Contributor

Dr Leiya Lee earned his PhD in Film Studies from Kingston University London in 2017. He is currently working in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Hong Kong. His main interest centres around using time travel as a model to understand moving images: narration and spectatorship, film history, and even theory. He has also worked as sound engineer and music composer in the past.

Introduction

Ten Years (year of release: 2015; directors: Kwok Zune, Wong Fei-pang, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-wai, Ng Kai-leung; original title in traditional Chinese: 十年) is an omnibus film locally made in Hong Kong on a shoestring budget of about HK$0.5 million (£49,000 or US$64,000).[1]With a running time of 104 minutes, it features five short independent films that are dystopias set in Hong Kong in the year 2025. Each of these five shorts was made by a different director. The five film directors only joined the Hong Kong film industry recently and are little known. They belong to the group of Hong Kong SAR New Wave directors, who started making films, and / or garnering a reputation for their works, after 1997.[2]On the surface, Ten Years presents the audience with a bleak picture of what Hong Kong may be like ten years into the future. As the film’s publicity slogan implies, it is a wake-up call for complacent Hongkongers who have not yet noticed the challenges — political, economic, social, and cultural — that Sinicisation has brought to this former British Crown Colony. Some scholars designate this challenge as “Mainlandization”, the geopolitical connotation being that Hong Kong is peripheral to China proper and is being forcibly assimilated into the People’s Republic of China (PRC).[3]I use “Sinicisation” here to suggest a more holistic and hegemonic influence of the PRC on Hong Kong, even as the latter continues to take pride in being a major hub of East-West hybridisation, and in having a different historical trajectory from that of the PRC. This essay builds on such associations arising from Ten Years, but further explores what the omnibus film signifies in the context of the most recent developments in the Hong Kong film industry. I will first investigate, through this film, the continuous identity negotiations made by Hongkongers, particularly the Hong Kong Chinese. This discussion forms the basis of my discussion and argument that I see Ten Years as an unexpected, yet promising, watershed of the Hong Kong film industry’s trajectory in the early twenty-first century.

Ten Years  and Hongkongers’ Identity Struggles in All Kinds of “Transitions”

Hong Kong’s multilayered transitions resulting from its sovereignty transfer did not end instantly at midnight, 30 June 1997, when the official Handover occurred. As I argued elsewhere, the transitions are ongoing processes related to every aspect of Hong Kong.[4]Thus, Ten Years is not based on the mere speculations of the filmmakers. The short films reflect their directors’ informed estimates of where Hong Kong might be headed, as the city and its residents continuously and helplessly readjust themselves to the surrounding political-economic, sociocultural changes that started some twenty years ago. The despair and grief of Hongkongers culminated in the seventy-nine-day Umbrella Movement (28 September 2014 – 15 December 2014), which broke out after the Beijing government had effectively refused to the city’s residents the right of universal suffrage in choosing their own government head. The Hong Kong Basic Law (Article 45) had originally promised universal suffrage to all eligible Hong Kong voters.

Inspired by the Umbrella Movement, all five directors of Ten Years exercised the creative freedom granted them by the film’s producers to portray what would happen in the Hong Kong of 2025.[5]Unlike their predecessors in the first and second Hong Kong New Waves, who were mostly graduates of British and American film schools, and were active in the Hong Kong film industry in the 1980s and 1990s, these five directors are recent graduates of local film schools in Hong Kong. Their points of reference in the post-1997 Hong Kong are very different from those of their predecessors. Unlike the latter, Ten Years’s directors no longer see Hong Kong as a prosperous global city, whose residents were striving to build a local sociocultural identity of their own towards the end of British colonial rule. The five directors’ working environment in the ailing Hong Kong film industry of the new millennium is also drastically different from that of their predecessors, who thrived during the industry’s golden period twenty years earlier.[6]Ackbar Abbas’s thought-provoking idea of “culture in a space of disappearance”, which explains the worries and anxieties of Hongkongers facing the sovereignty transfer, becomes obsolete in the case of these new filmmakers and their films.[7]

Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai saw in 2004 that Hong Kong was undergoing a “crisis” and that Hong Kong cinema was a “crisis cinema”, when “any departure from ‘home’ engenders a ‘crisis’ — a threat to our ontological security”.[8]More than a decade after Cheung and Chu first presented the notion of “crisis cinema”, Hong Kong is again in a different phase of development. What it has now is not simply a crisis, but an incomparable scale of difficulty regarding the promised fifty-year transition period of no changes under the “one country, two systems” political framework (according to which Hong Kong is to be allowed a high degree of autonomy from China for fifty years after the political Handover). Whereas this transition period should end in 2047, there are increasing signs that the “two systems” are already being transformed into “one system” — that of the PRC. The latest of these signs are the Hong Kong government’s proposed amendments to the extradition law, which would allow extradition from Hong Kong to mainland China.[9]In general, “transition” is a neutral term that could refer both to good and bad developments. But the transitions in question involve various uncertainties that provoke anxiety in people, and sometimes actual suffering, to an extent where they may feel diminished and “lost” (in the sense that Chu argues).[10]

In view of Hong Kong’s current plight and uncertain political future in the remaining time of the fifty-year transition period, Ten Years represents the filmmakers’ plea to their fellow Hongkongers to give profound thought to their city’s future. Hong Kong is their home — a very dilapidated home in the 2010s, in desperate need of being saved before it is too late. The directors’ short films point out poignantly that Hong Kong’s political and sociocultural deterioration has been a result of twenty years of Sinicisation after the sovereignty transfer, accompanied by many negative socio-political events in the city. Each director deals with a specific area of concern that has long plagued Hongkongers.[11]Extras (director: Kwok Zune; original title in traditional Chinese: 浮瓜) alludes to the incompetence of government officials and politicians in defending Hong Kong’s own socio-political benefits, and the negative impacts of the proposed (Chinese) national security law for Hong Kong. Season of the End (director: Wong Fei-pang; original title in traditional Chinese:冬蟬) highlights the helplessness of the city’s conservation, and related environmental, movements. Dialect (director: Jevons Au; original title in traditional Chinese: 方言) responds to the local government’s barbaric downplaying of the sociocultural value of the Cantonese Chinese language — the lingua franca of most Chinese Hongkongers — while promoting the Mandarin Chinese language in the local education system. Self-immolator (director: Chow Kwun-wai; original title in traditional Chinese: 自焚者) explores the theme of self-sacrifice against the backdrop of the curbing of all kinds of civic freedoms in Hong Kong, street protests, and the political tabooing of “Hong Kong Independence”. Local Egg (director: Ng Ka-leung; original title in traditional Chinese: 本地蛋) laments the marginalisation of localism. It sympathises with the plight of a shrinking local agriculture as Hong Kong’s suburban areas become increasingly urbanised.

Ten Years and the Hong Kong Film Industry

The strong messages conveyed by Ten Years echo the anxieties and fears of many Hongkongers. The film proved extremely popular among local cinemagoers, earning HK$6 million (£590,000 or US$764,000) at the local Hong Kong box office within two months of its general release. It grossed more than the earnings of Star Wars, shown in roughly the same period, at one of the commercial exhibition outlets in the city.[12]The box office takings enabled Ten Years’s filmmakers to recoup twelvefold the film’s initial investment. Ten Years went on to win the “Best Film” Award at the 35^th edition of the Hong Kong Film Awards (the local equivalent of the Academy Awards) in 2016, amidst the mainland Chinese media’s boycott on reporting this achievement.[13]From the perspective of the Hong Kong film industry, Ten Years has two significant qualities that, I argue, make the film an unexpected, yet positive, watershed in the continuous development of the local film industry.

The first quality marking Ten Years as a crucial turning point is that it is an exemplary work pertaining to a new form of East Asian anthology film, whose omnibus mode of production is in direct descent from pan-Asian horror films like Three (year of release: 2002; directors: Kim Jee-woon [South Korea], Nonzee Nimibutr [Thailand], Peter Chan [Hong Kong]; original title in traditional Chinese: 三更). While its predecessors in the horror genre were mainly the product of shrewd commercial calculations, the omnibus form of Ten Years serves the purpose of political critique.[14]The film has found kindred spirits in other parts of East and Southeast Asia, and has now grown into a socio-political franchise, the “Ten Years International” project, which has spawned Japanese, Taiwanese, and Thai versions in the respective countries.[15]

The second quality of Ten Years that makes it a promising watershed in the development of the local film industry is that it has broken the vicious cycle of direct competition with the dominant China-Hong Kong film co-productions for the limited time and space of local theatrical release. Since the signing of the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) between the Beijing government and the local Hong Kong government in 2003, the Hong Kong film industry has moved into a phase of asymmetrical bipolarisation. Most of the Hong Kong-related film projects are big-budget China-Hong Kong co-productions. The annual number of domestically produced Hong Kong films, which were the staple of the entire Hong Kong film industry between the late 1970s and late 1990s, has decreased to a minority in the current Hong Kong film industry.

The competition between locally produced Hong Kong films and China-Hong Kong co-produced films is indicated by the latest film industry figures in Table 1.[16]The second column from the left shows the numbers of locally produced Hong Kong films released in Hong Kong from 2012 to 2017. The third column from the left shows the numbers of China-Hong Kong co-produced films released in Hong Kong over the same period. The numbers seem to indicate that the annual output of these two types of Hong Kong-related films has remained more or less the same over the time period in question. But if we also look at the market share percentage of these two types of films on the local audience market (in brackets next to the numbers), it becomes clear that while the overall quantity of the film output remains relatively stable, its internal make-up varies substantially over the years.

The years 2012 and 2013 saw the dominance of China-Hong Kong co-produced films, their number being twice that of domestically produced Hong Kong films in 2012, and 20 percent more than the locally produced Hong Kong films in 2013. The years 2014 and 2015 saw this market share gap narrowing down. In 2014 there was only an 8 percent of difference between them, while in 2015 the gap widened again slightly to 15 percent. These local audience market changes coincided with the outbreak of a number of significant political events in Hong Kong. The gap of the market share between the two categories of Hong Kong-related films started to widen yet again in 2016 and 2017.

Moreover, the data noted in Table 1 here are publicly available on the official website of Create Hong Kong (CreateHK), an agency under the management of the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR government.^[17]Its main responsibilities include coordinating “Government policy and effort regarding creative industries”, focusing “Government’s resources catering for the promotion and speeding up of the development of creative industries in Hong Kong”, working “closely with the trade to boost the development of creative industries”. Besides the local film industry, CreateHK is also responsible for the design and digital entertainment industries.

Table 1. Number (and Percentage) of Different Types of Hong Kong-related Films Produced and Released in Hong Kong, 2012–17

Sources: Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 (n.d.)

Since 2012, the compilation of these Hong Kong film industry data has been done by a local film industry organisation, the Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association, and financially supported by CreateHK. Ten Years was officially recorded as one of the twenty-three domestically produced Hong Kong films in 2015. This in itself is quite an achievement, for several other prominent independent Hong Kong film productions, exhibited via commercial cinema networks at around the same time, never made their way to the local government records. For unknown reasons, they are simply missing there. Most notable among these are Lessons in Dissent (year of release: 2014; director: Matthew Torne; original title in traditional Chinese: 未夠秤) and Yellowing (year of release: 2016; director: Chan Tze-woon; original title in traditional Chinese: 亂世備忘). Despite its box office success, the domestic theatrical release of Ten Years in Hong Kong was abruptly stopped, possibly due to self-censorship on the part of the exhibition sector (which exhibitors would not admit).[18]Since then, the film has changed its distribution / exhibition strategy. It was subsequently shown at over 200 community screenings (often free of charge), and more than thirty film festivals around the world.[19]

The involuntary modification made to the distribution / exhibition plan of Ten Years was a blessing in disguise. It gave the film a second chance to expand its target audience base through non-profit grassroots channels and online subscription media platforms. In addition to the importance of “community screenings” for maintaining public awareness of Ten Years, the film was at some point “Hong Kong’s single-most downloaded item on iTunes”.[20]

The way in which Ten Years broke away from the conventional practice of local commercial distribution / exhibition networks was completely different from what an earlier generation of Hong Kong independent filmmakers, such as Fruit Chan, typically did. Although with independent funding, these earlier Hong Kong independent filmmakers still had to rely on the local commercial distribution and exhibition networks to show their films and make their names known.[21]Ten Years thus acted as a pathbreaker for its contemporaries, paving the way for other purely local Hong Kong films (especially those who were refused access to mainstream film distribution / exhibition networks) to use these alternative paths to reach their local audience. Feature-length political documentaries, such as Yellowing, Lost in the Fumes (year of release: 2017; director: Nora Lam; original title in traditional Chinese: 地厚天高), and Vanished Archives (year of release: 2017; director: Connie Lo; original title in traditional Chinese: 消失的檔案), have found their images seen and voices heard through such alternative channels of distribution and exhibition.[22]

Conclusion

Whether it is about cinematic representations of identity or its alternative modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, Ten Years embodies not despair, but hope for a better future for Hongkongers who care about their hometown, and for loyal admirers of Hong Kong cinema. The film has become a major representative of those self-sustainable indigenous Hong Kong independent film productions of the 2010s. It symbolises a break from some of the bad habits that the said industry has acquired over the years, e.g., the overreliance on China-Hong Kong film co-productions to save the waning Hong Kong film industry. At the same time, Ten Years reminds other filmmakers to keep trying and never give up the search for ways of their own. Ten Years will definitely not be the last Hong Kong film to represent a change in the trajectory of the Hong Kong film industry. With the seeds it has sown, more and more local Hong Kong films of similar robustness will likely be made.

Notes

[1]Ten Years: Inside and Outside (in traditional Chinese), Ten Years’s DVD Book (Hong Kong: Ten Years Studio, 2016), 85.

[2]Hong Kong SAR is short for the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China”, which became the official name of Hong Kong after its 1997 transfer of sovereignty from the British to the Chinese. See Laikwan Pang, “Trans-national Cinema, Creative Labor, and New Directors in Hong Kong,” Asia Japan Journal 4 (2009): 83-86; Mirana May Szeto and Yun-chung Chen, “Hong Kong Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalization and Mainlandization: Hong Kong SAR New Wave as a Cinema of Anxiety,” in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, eds. Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Esther C.M. Yau (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 89-115; Yiu-Wai Chu, Found in Transition: Hong Kong Studies in the Age of China (New York: State University of New York Press, 2018), 122.

[3]See, for example, Szeto and Chen, “Hong Kong Cinema,” 89.

[4]Ruby Cheung, New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-century East Asia (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 16-18.

[5]Nan-Hie In, “Q&A: ‘Ten Years’ Filmmakers on their Surprise Hit and Controversy,” Forbes, 28 April 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nanhiein/2016/04/28/ten-years-filmmakers-on-their-surprise-hit-and-controversy-qa (accessed 26 March 2019).

[6]Chu, Found in Transition, 122.

[7]Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1-15.

[8]Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai, “Introduction: Between Home and World,” in Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, eds. Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004), xv.

[9]Alvin Lum, Tony Cheung, and Jeffie Lam, “Thousands Take to Hong Kong Streets against Proposal to Extradite Suspects to Mainland China,” South China Morning Post, 31 March 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3004031/thousands-take-hong-kong-streets-against-proposal-extradite (accessed 1 April 2019).

[10]Yiu-Wai Chu, Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China (New York: State University of New York Press, 2013), 3-4.

[11]Ten Years: Inside and Outside, 2016.

[12]Ilaria Maria Sala, “Ten Years — The Terrifying Vision of Hong Kong that Beijing Wants Obscured,” The Guardian, 11 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/11/ten-years-the-terrifying-vision-of-hong-kong-that-beijing-wants-obscured (accessed 26 March 2019).

[13]Tom Grundy, “Dystopian Box Office Hit Ten Years Wins ‘Best Film’ at 2016 HK Film Awards, as News of Win is Censored in China,” Hong Kong Free Press, 3 April 2016, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/04/03/dystopian-box-office-hit-ten-years-wins-best-movie-at-2016-hong-kong-film-awards (accessed 26 March 2019).

[14]Cheung, New Hong Kong Cinema, 94-95.

[15]Karen Fang, “Ten Years: What Happened to the Filmmakers behind the Dystopian Hong Kong Indy Film?,” Hong Kong Free Press, 10 July 2017, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/07/10/ten-years-happened-filmmakers-behind-dystopian-hong-kong-indy-film (accessed 1 April 2019).

[16]Source: “Publication”, under “About Us”, Create Hong Kong’s official website (English), https://www.createhk.gov.hk (accessed 29 April 2019).

[17]Source: Create Hong Kong’s official website (English), https://www.createhk.gov.hk (accessed 29 April 2019).

[18]Kinling Lo, “Backlash after ‘Emotional Win’ for Ten Years,” The Standard, 5 April 2016, http://www.thestandard.com.hk/section-news.php?id=167917 (accessed 26 March 2019); In, “Q&A: ‘Ten Years’ Filmmakers,” 2016. See also Ten Years’s weekend box office figures on Box Office Mojo’s website (https://www.boxofficemojo.com) (accessed 1 April 2019).

[19]Christopher Niem, “Interview: Ten Years Producer Andrew Choi Hopes to Make, and See, More Independent Films,” Hong Kong Free Press, 30 October 2017, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/10/30/interview-ten-years-producer-andrew-choi-hopes-make-see-independent-films (accessed 26 March 2019).

[20]Fang, “Ten Years,” 2017.

[21]Cheung, New Hong Kong Cinema, 115-16.

[22]Michelle Chan, “Hong Kong Film Flirts with Political Controversy,” Nikkei Asian Review, 14 April 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Arts/Hong-Kong-film-flirts-with-political-controversy (accessed 1 April 2019); Vivienne Chow, “Guerrilla Tactics as Hong Kong Documentary ‘Yellowing’ Denied Theatrical Release,” Variety, 2 September 2016, http://variety.com/2016/film/asia/guerilla-screenings-hong-kong-yellowing-release-1201850957 (accessed 1 April 2019); Elson Tong, “Hong Kong Int’l Film Festival Denies Rejecting 1967 Riots Documentary for Trivial Reasons,” Hong Kong Free Press, 11 March 2017, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/03/11/hong-kong-intl-film-festival-denies-rejecting-1967-riots-documentary-trivial-reasons (accessed 1 April 2019).

Bibliography

Abbas, Ackbar.Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Chan, Michelle. “Hong Kong Film Flirts with Political Controversy”. Nikkei Asian Review, 14, April 2018. https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Arts/Hong-Kong-film-flirts-with-political-controversy (accessed 1 April 2019).

Cheung, Esther M.K., and Chu Yiu-wai. “Introduction: Between Home and World.” In Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai, xii-xxxv. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Cheung, Ruby. New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-century East Asia. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016.

Chow, Vivienne. “Guerrilla Tactics as Hong Kong Documentary ‘Yellowing’ Denied Theatrical Release.” Variety, 2 September,2016. http://variety.com/2016/film/asia/guerilla-screenings-hong-kong-yellowing-release-1201850957 (accessed 1 April 2019).

Chu, Yiu-Wai. Found in Transition: Hong Kong Studies in the Age of China. New York: State University of New York Press, 2018.

Chu, Yiu-Wai. Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China. New York: State University of New York Press, 2013.

Fang, Karen. “Ten Years: What Happened to the Filmmakers behind the Dystopian Hong Kong Indy Film?.” Hong Kong Free Press, 10 July,2017. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/07/10/ten-years-happened-filmmakers-behind-dystopian-hong-kong-indy-film (accessed 1 April 2019).

Grundy, Tom. “Dystopian Box Office Hit Ten Years Wins ‘Best Film’ at 2016 HK Film Awards, as News of Win is Censored in China.” Hong Kong Free Press, 3 April, 2016. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/04/03/dystopian-box-office-hit-ten-years-wins-best-movie-at-2016-hong-kong-film-awards (accessed 26 March 2019).

In, Nan-Hie. “Q&A: ‘Ten Years’ Filmmakers on their Surprise Hit and Controversy.” Forbes, 28 April, 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nanhiein/2016/04/28/ten-years-filmmakers-on-their-surprise-hit-and-controversy-qa (accessed 26 March 2019).

Lo, Kinling. “Backlash after ‘Emotional Win’ for Ten Years.” The Standard, 5 April, 2016. http://www.thestandard.com.hk/section-news.php?id=167917 (accessed 26 March 2019).

Lum, Alvin, Tony Cheung, and Jeffie Lam. “Thousands Take to Hong Kong Streets against Proposal to Extradite Suspects to Mainland China.” South China Morning Post, 31 March, 2019. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3004031/thousands-take-hong-kong-streets-against-proposal-extradite (accessed 1 April 2019).

Niem, Christopher. “Interview: Ten Years Producer Andrew Choi Hopes to Make, and See, More Independent Films.” Hong Kong Free Press, 30 October,2017. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/10/30/interview-ten-years-producer-andrew-choi-hopes-make-see-independent-films (accessed 26 March 2019).

Pang, Laikwan. “Trans-national Cinema, Creative Labor, and New Directors in Hong Kong.” Asia Japan Journal 4 (2009): 79-87.

Sala, Ilaria Maria. “Ten Years — The Terrifying Vision of Hong Kong that Beijing Wants Obscured.” The Guardian, 11 March, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/11/ten-years-the-terrifying-vision-of-hong-kong-that-beijing-wants-obscured (accessed 26 March 2019).

Szeto, Mirana May, and Yun-chung Chen. “Hong Kong Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalization and Mainlandization: Hong Kong SAR New Wave as a Cinema of Anxiety.” In A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Esther C.M. Yau, 89-115. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

Ten Years — Inside and Outside (in traditional Chinese). Ten Years’s DVD Book. Hong Kong: Ten Years Studio, 2016.

Tong, Elson. “Hong Kong Int’l Film Festival Denies Rejecting 1967 Riots Documentary for Trivial Reasons.” Hong Kong Free Press, 11 March, 2017. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/03/11/hong-kong-intl-film-festival-denies-rejecting-1967-riots-documentary-trivial-reasons (accessed 1 April 2019).

Filmography

Lessons in Dissent (year of release: 2014; director: Matthew Torne; original title in traditional Chinese: 未夠秤)

Lost in the Fumes (year of release: 2017; director: Nora Lam; original title in traditional Chinese: 地厚天高)

Ten Years (year of release: 2015; directors: Kwok Zune, Wong Fei-pang, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-wai, Ng Kai-leung; original title in traditional Chinese: 十年):

1. Extras (director: Kwok Zune; original title in traditional Chinese: 浮瓜)
2. Season of the End (director: Wong Fei-pang; original title in traditional Chinese: 冬蟬)
3. Dialect (director: Jevons Au; original title in traditional Chinese: 方言)
4. Self-immolator (director: Chow Kwun-wai; original title in traditional Chinese: 自焚者)
5. Local Egg (director: Ng Ka-leung; original title in traditional Chinese: 本地蛋)

Three (year of release: 2002; directors: Kim Jee-woon [South Korea], Nonzee Nimibutr [Thailand], Peter Chan [Hong Kong]; original title in traditional Chinese: 三更)

Vanished Archives (year of release: 2017; director: Connie Lo; original title in traditional Chinese: 消失的檔案)

Yellowing (year of release: 2016; director: Chan Tze-woon; original title in traditional Chinese: 亂世備忘)

Notes on Contributor

Ruby Cheung is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. She is one of the first generation of PhD graduates from Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Ruby is the author of New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-century East Asia (2016). With Dina Iordanova, Ruby co-edited Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (2010) and Film Festival Yearbook 3: Film Festivals and East Asia (2011). She is the main editor of Cinemas, Identities and Beyond (2009).

The Ten Years Thailand project was first announced to the Thai film community in April 2017, when five participating filmmakers sought crowdfunding through the San Francisco-based Indiegogo website (unfortunately, only 2 percent of its US$ 200,000 budget was raised in this initial campaign.) The directors involved represented both old and new generations of Thai cinema, both arthouse and popular filmmaking styles, both partisan and non-partisan ideology. The film presents speculative visions of the near future, all of which are informed in some way by Thailand’s longstanding political crisis.[i] As the crisis has unfolded, three of the filmmakers – Wisit Sasantieng (Tears of a Black Tiger), Chookiat Sakveerajul[ii] (13 Beloved) and Apichatpong Weerasathekul – have shown signs of support for the ‘red shirt’ political movement in Thailand. The political viewpoints of Aditya Assarat (Wonderful Town) and video artist Chulayarnoon Siripohol are less clear. The film was shortlisted to receive a grant from Thailand’s Culture Ministry, subsequently receiving the highest available sum of US$ 30,000,[iii] and the finished film screened out-of-competition at Cannes, the most high-profile opening of the series so far. This version omitted Chookiat’s[iv] section.

In its theatrical version, Ten Years Thailand tells four different stories about Thai society, all set in the decade following 2018, against the background of the military government that has ruled since 2014. During this period of military rule, several significant upheavals have occurred, from the initial coup to the death of King Rama IX and a serious economic downturn. The four segments are framed within two distinct settings – the realistic everyday world and surrealistic imaginative worlds – which are rendered through the use of various styles, from realist fiction to surrealism and quasi-documentary. The first and last sections of the film, Aditya’s Sunset and Apichatpong’s Song of the City, ground their stories in lifelike settings, invoking some sense of hope. The middle sections, Wisit’s Catopia and Chulayarnnon’s Planetarium, on the other hand, turn the ‘land of no smiles’ into a site of violence and destruction where only non-humans, cats and brainwashed people can survive.

Questions of past, present and future can be viewed in terms of what Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet called ‘becomings’.[v] For them, ‘future and past don’t have much meaning’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977, 23). Applying this to the representations of the future in Ten Years Thailand, I will argue that the path between 2018 and 2028 is characterised by both a duality of quasi-immobility and mobility in time and place. Three of the four sections of the anthology take place in recognisable landscapes of the present, while Planetarium mixes a stylised, unreal environment with real aspects of the everyday present. Notably, the filmmakers do not choose the political movements of the early part as their starting context, presumably because the current political conflicts in Thailand began almost fifteen years ago. This lends the film an uneven of temporal mobility, with the only signs of movement related to place, from the art gallery and urban small town to post-human dystopias of control and surveillance. However, the order of the film’s episodes – from realism to surrealism and then quasi-realism – explicates the spaces of future Thailand, from grey-black apocalypse to land of possibility, depending on the actions people take.

In Aditya’s Sunset, a group of soldiers and police officers make a surprise visit to an art gallery to inspect the ‘unsuitable’ message that appears in a photo exhibition entitled I Laughed So Hard I Cried. While the inspection goes on, a young naive conscript Kaen, who works as the lieutenant’s driver, develops a romance with a female member of the gallery’s staff. Here, Thailand appears to be divided into two opposite worlds, represented through the use of black and white cinematography. The naivety of the powerless on one hand, the exercise of power to establish what is right or wrong on the other. Director Aditya deliberately emphasizes this binary contrast, displacing questions of political polarisation – the yellow- and red-shirt conflicts – into a grey area where the multifaced identities of both groups are represented. Thus the lieutenant, played by real-life artist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon, who is also the manager of the gallery used as the story’s location, is characterised as weary of having to respond to public complaints, even making plans to have himself transferred to other duties. Kaen is portrayed as a boy who is potentially on the path to a similar position of power, but who is barely brave enough to talk to the girl he likes. Similarly, while the police chief overexercises his power against the artist and curator, another officer is seen crying in the photograph. Interestingly, power does not reside solely in the hands of officials. Annoyed by a noisy, bossy cop, the gallery’s cleaner protects her territory by directing him to use an outside toilet. This low-level tactical response to institutional power might also be read in terms of the misinformation that so often defines today’s world, in politics as in other areas of everyday life. Shot with low-key lighting and minimum camera movement, the sunset at the last scene is dim with little hope.

Political rifts feature in the surrealist world of Catopia, in which director Wisit follows the survival of a lone human being who lives among half-feline, half-human creatures. By using an artificial perfume, he can mingle with them without being noticed, until he rescues a catwoman who is to be stoned to death, suspected of being a human in disguise. This surrealist plot, however, is set against a contemporary backdrop, signifying that the episode’s themes are intended to resonate with the current time. Through the use of an entirely handheld camera, this ‘paradise’ of cats shows the reinforcing of political divides. Dissidents are hunted, interrogated and imprisoned by agents of a military government. Games of hunter versus hunted appear everywhere. In fact, survivors like Methee have to disguise themselves, hide or escape. Contrary to Aditya’s democratic balance between interest groups, Wisit signals something related to the present climate of nonconformism. Moreover, the symbol of the cat might refer to the exile politician Thaksin Shinawat whose nickname sounds like the crying of cat or Abhisit Vejjajiva, head of the royalist Democratic Party, who is a known cat lover.[vi] Despite the tragic end, Catopia is fun with the director’s sense of humour that is hidden throughout the film. Catlover might enjoy to see the vending machine with full of cat’s food and toys.

The anthology’s third segment, Chulayarnnon’s Planetarium, is an abstract, retro-animated mockery of official control over young people’s lives that specifically targets the policies of the Ministries of Culture and Education. The episode shows youngsters’ daily lives as subject to control – through Buddhism in particular – throughout childhood, from acceptable hairstyles and ways of expressing happiness to the correct ways of showing deference and religious piety. Here, all behaviour is instilled and monitored by the ‘Ministry of Smartphone’. Anyone disobeying the rules – sometimes just by lying face down on the ground – must be destroyed and rebooted. Chulayarnnon playfully assembles the experiences faced by every boy and girl in Thai schools into a jukebox game of the absurd. Every detail in this segment is intended as criticism of Thai society. The scarves worn by the students are based on the uniforms worn by Thai scout troops. The female Minister of VHS is reminiscent of many female headteachers, and more specifically of the conservative former MP Rabiabrat Phongpanich, who regularly pops up in the news media to criticize anything she deems not to conform to correct female behaviour. Chulayarnnon sarcastically crafts this piece in the hyper-surrealism where a series of installation arts encounter one another.

As the anthology moves from hope to dystopia, there seems to be no future available for Thailand just a decade from now. Apichatpong’s return to the realistic setting of his hometown Khon Kaen in Song of the City prompts Thai viewers to confront our experience of living in a country eternally undergoing reconstruction. Set in a park where there stands a statue of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, a notorious dictator who seized power in a coup in 1957 and used his power to accumulate a vast fortune in just a few years, the piece is like the reminiscences of a director looking back upon his previous films, his hometown and the changes it has gone through in his lifetime, and the imperfections of Thailand. There are brief appearances by characters from his previous films – Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) and Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) from Tropical Malady (2004), the female doctor (Nantarat Sawaddikul) from Syndromes and a Century (2006), and the comatose soldier from Cemetery of Splendor (2015). Along with these long-time associates of Apichatpong, a real-life political prisoner, Patiwat Saraiyaem, appears as a cheerful northeastern folk singer who has taken a temporary job as a salesman for the Good Sleep Machine. (In 2015, Patiwat was sentenced to a five-year jail term for insulting the monarchy in a university play. He was released two years later as part of an amnesty.) Apichatpong tries to show that in a country like Thailand that is continually being rebuilt, the notion of a positive future is a mere sales pitch, or a dream. Most of the scenes were shot with minimum movement – long-take in particular and few dialogues. Like the old man who contemplates his life in the park, life still goes on no matter how much hardship we encounter.

Under a holistic outlook, the anthology manifests the structure of fragmentation, with the linear narratives of each segment based on the present point – the middle in the time machine. Aditya’s Sunset and Apichatpong’s Song of the City tells the past event to the present setting; Wisit’s Catopia and Chulayarnnon’s Planetarium starts the present stories in the mode of future – all summed up as a ‘labyrinthine model of time’ (Martin-Jones, 2006, 23). While the two realists offer a trip through the directorial memories – especially in the section of Apichatpong, the surrealist segments lead us with the actions of hunt-and-escape, and controlling-and-destroying. Deleuze’s time-image and action-movement are competing against one another. In fact, this duality can be seen throughout the film – the fragmentation of the whole against the linear of each section, and the characteristics of cinema of time and the cinema of movement, which at the end represent the counteraction between hope and hopelessness.

In contrast to the sense of temporal hopelessness suggested by the quote from George Orwell’s 1984 at the beginning of the film – “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” – this anthology conflicts the concept of time and the final message. The trips to memories of Sunset and Song of the City signify some hope; the surrealists of Catopia and Planetarium show hopelessness – the future. There is no clear future, no clear becoming. Deleuze and Parnet asserted that ‘becomings belong to geography’ (Deleuze & Parnet, ibid., p.2, 31), and so the film’s characters move on and on, like nomads – like the filmmaking path in these directors. Future becoming depends on us the audiences.

Notes

[i] Thailand has been in political crisis since 2005, culminating in the division of two camps signified by color. The Red Shirts began as supporters – mostly from among the poor – of the populist party of prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, while the Yellow Shirts comprised urban, middle-class royalists who opposed Thaksin’s corruption (BBC, 2012). During the long-running conflict between the two sides, the military staged two coups, in 2006 and 2014.

[ii] Chookiat’s segment was also not included in the domestic release that took place at the end of 2018, with no explanation. It is said that the segment was too long to be assembled with the other four sections and would be screened separately. But his section was also submitted to the Culture Ministry, to fulfil the grant requirements.

[iii] The grants were categorized into several types, along the guidelines of other film festivals, such as script, production, or distribution, and have ranged between US$900 – 62,500.

[iv] This essay follows the Thai custom of referring to a person by his or her first name.

[v] Gilles Deleuze and journalist Claire Parnet had planned to publish a conventional book of interviews which included those with influential writers such as Noam Chomsky. But they realized that the interview format was inappropriate and decided instead to use a ‘dialogue’ form consisting of two halves without distinct beginning or end. The book was titled Dialogues.

[vi] Abhisit Vejjajiva was the former leader of the oldest Thai political party, the Democratic Party. Graduating from Eton and Oxford, he used to be a symbol of liberal hopes for a progressive modernisation of Thai society. Wisit’s antagonism towards Abhisit can also be found in his other film, The Red Eagle, a remake of an old action film that recasts the story as a fight for political justice by the superhero.

Bibliography

BBC. “Profile: Thailand’s reds and yellows.” Accessed April 1,  2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13294268.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze. Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Notes on Contributor

Anchalee Chaiworaporn has been writing or both local and foreign publications for two decades. Her works had been published in across the world. Since 2002, she has received foreign grants to do the research on Asian cinema in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and US. She is also a guest speaker across Asia and others. She used to be a project leader of Thailand Research Fund’s national research project on criticism in arts. Presently, she is involved into a national project on the consciousness of artists in the evolution of Thai arts and culture.

Driven by the phenomenal success of Hong Kong’s Ten Years (2015), the five-episode omnibus film Ten Years Taiwan (2018) cinematically envisions Taiwan’s future in the year 2027 without acknowledging neighboring China’s ultimate goal of unification, yet proves prophetic in terms of the conservative outcome of ten referendums and the success of the pro-Beijing KMT party in mayoral elections on November 24, 2018. Seemingly depoliticized and surprisingly devoid of the China factor, Ten Years Taiwan departs from its Hong Kong counterpart’s anger and anxieties over the erosion of local culture by China’s unkept promise of the “One Country, Two Systems” model, which was originally designed for Taiwan. Such avoidance may be symptomatic of self-censorship, conscious or unconscious, for fear of being boycotted by China. Admittedly, the five directors may coincidentally be more concerned with “livelihood issues” (minsheng wenti) such as nuclear waste disposal, air pollution, mistreatment of migrant workers, the outflow of talent from Taiwan, the north-south divide, low birthrate, same-sex marriage, and the feeling of being trapped economically and politically. However, the forest (China) and the trees (livelihood issues) are not mutually exclusive, but two sides of the same coin. If Hong Kong’s Ten Years attributes all the local problems to China as the Other, Ten Years Taiwan is beset with uncertainty caused by livelihood issues, at once local and transnational, instead of a threatening China.

Amis director Lekal Sumi Cilangasan’s “The Can of Anido” opens with the sound of wind and waves accompanying the indigenous singing by Maran, an elderly Yami man residing in Lanyu (Orchid Island). As a villager reminds him to take precautions against an imminent typhoon, Maran is framed in a long back shot contemplating the Pacific Ocean silently. The recurring oceanic shot functions like an external echo chamber reflecting the perceiver’s mental state without dialogue. The serene shot of the sea belies the fear of future Fukushima-like nuclear crisis. As the typhoon is raging outside, Maran contemplates the antinuclear protest signs at home which bear witness to the Yami people’s forced coexistence with nuclear waste disguised as fish cans since 1982. The next morning, Maran is stunned by the sight and sound of nuclear catastrophe: yellow cans washed on the shore and floating on the ocean to the ominous sound of nuclear warning siren, which turns out to be his nightmare. The episode comes full circle toward the end as a villager reminds Maran again to take precautions against the impending typhoon. The nuclear warning siren goes off, nondiegetically, with the belated appearance of the segment’s title above the beautiful sea. The Chinese title literally means “cans with evil spirits,” referring to the indigenous belief that the yellow cans of nuclear waste stored on the island contain evil spirits. The soothing sound of wind and waves stands in stark contrast with the unsettling nondiegetic siren signifying environmental hazard. The screen goes black and we hear the indigenous singing with both Chinese and English subtitles in frame center. Maran is reticent throughout the segment which ends with this song about a sinister, toxic force invading the island, which brings sorrow to the islanders. The living nightmare of living with nuclear waste has haunted the marginalized Yami people and returned with a vengeance in the pro/anti-nuclear energy referendums last November. The pro-nuclear proposal won, not because Taiwanese are in favor of nuclear energy, but because the majority mistakenly believe it is cleaner than coal, thus reducing air pollution. Air pollution becomes a recurring theme also in the second segment “942” and the fourth segment “A Making-of.”

If the first segment begins and ends with indigenous singing, Filipina-Taiwanese director Rina B. Tsou’s segment “942” opens with nurse 942’s offscreen female voice addressing Mr. Yeo Siew Hua. This cinephilic reference establishes intertextual connection between Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s second feature, A Land Imagined (2018), which won the Golden Leopard, and “942,” exemplifying transnational solidarity and inter-Asian attention to marginalized migrant workers as A Land Imagined is concerned with the disappearance of a Chinese migrant worker and his friendship with a fellow Bangladeshi construction worker. The numerical form of address “942” is paradoxically both impersonal and personal. Director Tsou has told me in personal communication that “942” was her student number at school. “It sounds like ‘It is me’ (jiushi wo) in Mandarin and ‘It is you’ (tō sī lí) in Taiwanese Hokkien. When I had this mirroring destiny idea…I recalled this number and used it.” The poster and the PA system in the hospital show that the year 2027 sees severe air pollution and the elderly stay at the lung protective center. The sci-fi space of an air duct appears before the title, bridging time and space, predetermined destiny and individual agency.

Nurse 942 (Alina Tsai) is in love with fellow female nurse 899. They live in a claustrophobic space in the hospital where air is unfiltered. They kiss each other passionately without wearing masks at the risk of inhaling toxic air. Working-class solidarity and lesbian intimacy characterize their relationship. Working abroad in Indonesia, nurse 942 is exploited, raped, and impregnated by her boss. She manages to capture a video of one of the multiple rapes on her phone, but during the press conference unsympathetic journalists and the shameless boss insinuate that all she wants is money. Her POV poor-quality rape video and the close-up of her face during the press conference invite identification with the victim. As the title suggests, the abuse of migrant workers concerns you and me. The injustice she suffers is represented through sound design in which her shouting “I don’t want any fucking money” is silenced and suggested only by the subtitles and the sound of her breathing is foregrounded. As Nurse 942 escapes through the air duct, she sees at the end of the duct her younger self ten years ago in Taiwan as a high school student whose student number was 942. Her father raped and impregnated the Indonesian domestic caregiver who took care of her grandfather. Both nurse 942’s boss and her father are played by the same actor and both nurse 942 and the Indonesian caregiver have similar bruises on their cheeks, sealing their mirroring destiny. Disillusioned with Taiwan as a “ghost island” (guidao), she determines to leave Taiwan to work abroad after graduation, only to suffer the same destiny as the Indonesian migrant worker. The segment ends in the space of the air duct where the Indonesian caregiver struggles to escape. The mistreatment of migrant workers, the outflow of human resources, and air pollution are all topical livelihood issues in Taiwan. The rape of the Indonesian caregiver was based on a real case in Taiwan’s second-largest city, Taichung, in 2016. Air pollution has plagued the city so much that a KMT Taichung mayor was elected last November claiming that she could purify the air.

The third segment “Way Home” directed by Lu Po-shun opens with the sound of casting divining blocks (pwah pwei) symbolizing not so much religiosity as uncertainty over Taiwan’s future. With one question in mind, believers would cast divining blocks on the floor, and the result indicates the god’s answer. A recent Bloomberg headline “Foxconn’s Gou Runs for Taiwan President, Citing Message From Sea Goddess [Mazu]” demonstrates that seeking divine guidance is part and parcel of Taiwan’s everyday life experience. “Way Home” paints a nuanced picture of the north-south divide. Dong-yang refuses to follow the older members of his family who have left or are leaving his and director Lu’s hometown of Yunlin County in southern Taiwan to seek better job opportunities in Taipei. It is true that an outflow of population in southern Taiwan has been taking place, constituting “northern drifters” (beipiao) and resonating with the outflow of talent at the national level not only represented in “942” but also referenced in “Way Home” (“Our factory has moved to Vietnam”). The static camera at Dongyong’s home represents the household god’s POV. As the camera moves outdoors with Dong-yang and his younger half-brother, the handheld movement is free and fluid in music video style. Through the rambling camera movement, the audience experiences a vibrant local culture on the street: firecrackers, loud Mazu processions, and scantily clad women pole dancing on top of jeeps. Dong-yang and friends’ carefree motorcycle ride accompanied by Taiwanese electronic dance music reminds one of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) and explains his emotional attachment to his hometown. They wander and play in an abandoned factory and on the beach before ending up in a magnificent yet deserted temple. Discontented with the divine message revealed by the divining blocks, Dong-yang leaves his brother behind and is later reconciled with him. The segment ends with his solo motorcycle ride into the night, the sound of casting divine blocks, a POV shot of the household god being removed by the family moving to Taipei, and an empty shot of the temple’s facade in a tone of lyrical uncertainty.

Characterized by its lighthearted and satirical tone, woman director Hsieh Pei-ju’s segment “A Making-of” stands out from the overall pessimism of the anthology. On the set of a commercial for Baby Shrimp Dumplings, CEO Chen seeks to revive the lost tradition of family reunion during Lunar New Year and insists on shooting with a real baby when it becomes a rarity because of Taiwan’s extremely low birthrate, aging population, and air pollution. In 2018, Taiwan’s birthrate was 7.56 per 1,000, hitting an eight-year low. Voters opposed same-sex marriage in the November referendum. Times have changed in 2027 and the gay couple in the commercial take center stage. To Chen, the baby symbolizes the hope and future of Taiwan and needs to be included as a token minority safeguarding family values. The artificial set, fake fragile baby dolls, direct address to the camera, and a make-believe happy family contribute to the sense of irretrievably disintegrated family values.

The final segment “The Sleep,” directed by Malaysia-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker Lau Kek-huat, opens with an offscreen female voice looking for her missing cat Wan Wan while the radio is playing Taiwanese folk song “Longing for the Spring Breeze” composed by Teng Yu-hsien in 1933. Wan Wan is how mainland Chinese refers to Taiwan. Lau suggests that if we remove the radical “eye” from the Taiwanese Hokkien title “睏眠,” we get “困民,” meaning “people who are trapped.” The final segment can thus be understood as a political allegory about searching for Taiwanese identity against historical amnesia and the economic and political isolation. The search for Wan Wan turns out to be Irene’s dream induced by the Sleep System in a sci-fi scenario. There are David Lynchian moments of hysterical woman, grotesque man, hallucinating music, inexplicable blood, mood swing, protracted duration of self-aggression, and blurred boundary between dream and reality, which make the Sleep Center feel more like a mental hospital for insomniacs, or social misfits incapable of facing the reality of protesters on the street or the people in front of them. One is reminded of 2046 (2004) when Irene, wearing a pink wig, sleepwalks into a bedroom like a robot incapable of feeling. The segment comes full circle and ends with the tune of “Longing for the Spring Breeze” attending the symbolic aerial image of Irene drifting on a Taiwan-shaped boat with her cat Wan Wan, most likely in yet another dream sequence. The feeling of fatigue and frustration and the fear of being trapped and historical amnesia give way to the tranquility of a sweet dream in the finale. Perhaps not coincidentally, Ten Years Thailand (2018) ends with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s segment “Song of the City,” in which a man tries to sell a “Good Sleep Machine” to a woman. The state of insomnia becomes a metaphor for a nation anxious about its uncertain future.

Although China is never alluded to in Ten Years Taiwan, its conspicuous absence haunts every informed audience member in the viewing experience. Perhaps it is an intended omission which has nothing to do with self-censorship. Still, the significant “livelihood issues” can be better situated in the transnational circuit not only between Taiwan and Japan (“The Can of Anido”), Taiwan and Indonesia (“942”), Taiwan and Vietnam (“Way Home”), but also between Taiwan and China. No one knows whether Taiwanese will wake up from a sweet dream or a nightmare in ten years. But everyone should be exempt from the fear of expression and imagination.

Notes on Contributor

Timmy Chih-Ting Chen is a Research Assistant Professor at the Academy of Film of Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Hong Kong with a dissertation entitled “In the Mood for Music: Sonic Extraterritoriality and Musical Exchange in Hong Kong Cinema,” which won the 2015–2016 Li Ka Shing Prize. He has published in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai (2016), Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes (2017), and The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s World of Tang China (2019).

Edited by Leiya Lee

Notes on Contributors

Clarence Tsui writes for the Hollywood Reporter and the South China Morning Post, also teaches Film Studies and Journalism at the Chinese University Hong Kong.

Dr Leiya Lee earned his PhD in Film Studies from Kingston University London in 2017. He is currently working in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Hong Kong. His main interest centres around using time travel as a model to understand moving images: narration and spectatorship, film history, and even theory. He has also worked as sound engineer and music composer in the past.