Cinema Censorship and Media Citizenship in the Hong Kong Film Ten Years

Cinema censorship is a relatively unexplored topic in the discipline of surveillance studies. While movies are frequent references throughout the scholarship, such citations tend to be limited to plot and imagery and overlook the ways in which the medium can be subject to state intervention or other forms of censorship and self-censorship. This essay uses the case of the 2015 Hong Kong independent film Ten Years to explore how cinema deserves to be considered alongside other media and communications whose vulnerability to institutional control and monitoring are already widely documented by surveillance studies. The film, which reflects Hong Kong residents’ critique of mounting Chinese power, was the object of an aggressive vilification and repression campaign by the mainland Chinese government. It also spawned a grassroots defense in which audiences and filmmakers mobilized around the film as a symbol and site of civic discourse and political critique. Using the concepts of participatory media and online activism and connecting Ten Years with Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella” protests against Chinese rule, this essay shows how cinema invites the same interventions and interactivity as social media and other digital or communications technologies. Indeed, because Ten Years’ history of populist activism resembles well-known instances of media mobilization such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, this essay demonstrates not only cinema’s multiple dimensions of relevance for surveillance studies but also uncovers new global spaces whose film history will diversify surveillance studies.