A Riot That Didn't Happen

In the spirit of autonomy, how can the voice of common people be heard and who gets to decide? Lok and his like-minded friends actively participated in the 2010 anti-rail movement through an online radio platform. Passionate about social causes, they eventually parted ways due to ideological differences on spreading their ideas and uniting the public. Fast forward to four years later, a more composed and experienced Lok remained as an organiser of various social movements, notably the Umbrella Movement. Bumping into a past comrade who is now a mere passerby, Lok reminisced about their shared pasts and less-than-amicable split. The cerebral short is also a moving coming-of-age story of Lok, now with evolved ideas, new identity and well-rounded perspectives.

It was raining non-stop when Hong Kong was rocked by the tumultuous events of October 2014 (the "umbrella movement"). In a fixed sequence shot, the film captured students meeting each other in the hall, in the rooms, discussing, arguing about or remaining indifferent to the event, while it continued to rain outside.

On a quiet London night, a boy and girl from Hong Kong meet by chance and travel together on the Night Tube, searching for iced lemon tea, less sugar.

What could possibly turn a shy, quiet nerd into a voyeur? A long, lazy summer coupled with endless boredom? Sometimes through his binoculars and other times loitering on campus, a secondary student seeks to get an early taste of what university life has in store for him, dropping in on lectures, stalking the object of his gaze and lurking within her personal spaces. Feeding on a voyeuristic and borderline intrusive look into the lives of others, the voyeur remains at distance an idle walker and casual observer of a time and place charged with passion of a political (and sexual) nature, until his path crosses with hers and the two finally converge…

Two independent stories - one from 2014 and the other from 2019 - are placed together, allowing us to look back at the Umbrella Movement and the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, which are considered to be pivotal moments in Hong Kong's pro-democracy activism.

After a year in London, Jiu’s girlfriend vanishes, leaving a seaside recording, a plant named “White White”, and an empty room.

That spring, there was _____ in the sky of H-ville. What is _____? No one can tell. The sudden “unknown” caused absurd and strange phenomena. The real nightmare was not the natural disaster, but the man-made one. The regime used this to implement the “state of exception”. The system continued to operate. How much human value would be left? As Giorgio Agamben stated at the beginning of the pandemic, “The epidemic has caused to appear with clarity that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition.”

2019 in Hong Kong, protests become our daily life. The stuffs in the streets after each protest are changing our urban landscape, and they become the view of our everyday life. Graffitis on walls, unscrewed railings, bricks, respirators, safety goggles. Everything records what has happened in the city and witnesses our beliefs. I walked through the streets with my camera after protests. Mr. LIU Yi Chang let the objects tell the story in his nouveau roman short story, Riot, in 1968. Likewise, I let the objects play the narrators and tell us about the protests. Moreover, there are conversations and dialectic between different narrators…