copyright 2018, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut, No. 58, winter, 2017-2018

Umbrella as symbol of inclusiveness

by Daniel C. Tsang

A conversation with documentarian Evans Chan on censorship and
Hong Kong's democratic Umbrella Movement of 2014

Introduction

Evans Chan is a New York-based playwright and critic, and a leading independent filmmaker from Hong Kong. He has made narrative features and documentaries, including 

• Crossings (1994),
• Journey to Beijing (1998), 
• The Map of Sex and Love (2001), 
• Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), 
• Datong: the Great Society (2011), and
• The Rose of the Name: Writing Hong Kong(2014). 

Time Out Hong Kong (March, 2012) named Chan’s directorial debut, To Liv(e) (1991), one of the hundred greatest Hong Kong films. Chan’s award-winning films have been shown at the Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Moscow, Vancouver, San Francisco and Taiwan Golden Horse film festivals, among others.

Raise the Umbrellas (2016) is an in-depth, almost two-hour documentary of the 2014 79-day uprising and street occupation in Hong Kong over the lack of democratic options for its residents[1] [open notes in new window] Rod Stoneman, former Chief Executive of the Irish Film Board, found Umbrellas "articulate, intelligent and moving." French critic Jean-Michel Frodon praised it as a "powerful film connecting the past and present [of Chinese democratic movements,] and the multigenerational phenomenon" of the Hong Kong occupation.

Umbrellas was released twenty years after the former British Crown Colony was turned over to China by Britain. The film starts off with a brief look at the colonization of Hong Kong in 1842 as a result of the Opium War. Only in the few years before the 1997 decolonization of Hong Kong did the British embark on expanding the electorate and make China promise to fully democratize the legislature and the Chief Executive office after 1997. But after China restricted electoral reform in 2014 by proposing to vet candidates for Chief Executive elections, massive protests erupted in the streets. Those protests and 79 days of occupying major thoroughfares became known as the Umbrella Movement, when demonstrators used umbrellas to protect themselves against tear gas, pepper spray, and police batons.

Key figures mentioned in the interview are three in the pan-democracy camp:

• Benny Tai, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, who conceived of the idea of Occupy Central, which mutated into the Umbrella Movement;
• Martin Lee, founding chairman of the Democratic Party and an internationally recognized advocate for democracy and human rights, often referred to as the "Father of Democracy" in Hong Kong; and
• Emily Lau, the first woman directly elected to the Legislative Council and the chairperson (2012-2016) of the Democratic Party.

On the opposing side is pro-Beijing, former legislator Jasper Tsang, who presided over the Legislative Council during Occupy.

In the interview, one of the topics Evans Chan discusses concerns the roles languages play in Hong Kong, where Cantonese remains the prevailing, indigenous language used by the populace at large. Chan, however interviewed these four key figures in English, rather than Cantonese, with Chinese traditional-character subtitling provided. He explains why.

Overall, the persistent use of Cantonese in Hong Kong, rather than Mandarin, is tied to a rising and enhanced sense of locally-based, Hong Kong identity, especially among the younger members of the populace. The latest poll (December, 2017), from the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme (HKUPOP), shows clearly that only 0.3% of Hong Kong’s youth under 30 identify as “Chinese,” with an additional 7% identifying as “Chinese in Hong Kong.” Of all polled, only 30.7% identify as Chinese or Chinese in Hong Kong. An overwhelming 89.9%, however, of those under 30 identify as “Hong Konger”or “Hong Konger in China,” with 67.6% of all polled identifying as such (https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/) .

This interview is by Daniel C. Tsang, a current visiting Fulbright research scholar working at Chinese University of Hong Kong Library and an honorary research fellow at HKUPOP. This article began as an oral interview first conducted on 10 November 2017 in Central Plaza, Wanchai, Hong Kong for Tsang’s Subversity Online podcast (http://www.kuci.org/podcastfiles/600/Sv171120.mp3). Parts of the podcast interview (e.g. Chan’s take on the Hong Kong independence movement and on film archiving) have been dropped, and the transcript has been further edited for readability, while additional email exchanges with Chan have been seamlessly incorporated here.

Note also that the interviewer is not related to Jasper Tsang.

*******

Daniel Tsang: So when did you know you were going to do the film [Raise the Umbrellas]? Also, being based in New York with trips back to Hong Kong, how did you handle the logistics in such an intercontinental collaborative effort?

Evans Chan: Yes, logistics are complex, and not just because of the physical distance between Hong Kong and New York. That's why it took two years to finish Raise the Umbrellas. The idea of making this film first occurred to me after the inception of Benny Tai's Occupy Central proposal in 2013. And I conducted my first interviews with student leaders Joshua Wong, Yvonne Leung and Vivian Yip in 2014, while shooting The Rose of the Name, my documentary about Dung Kai-cheung, Hong Kong’s leading novelist of the moment. Wong et al were all aware that something was going to happen in Hong Kong. I asked Nate Chan, my assistant director for Rose, to track Occupy events with a view toward making such a documentary. That's why when the director's cut of The Rose of the Name was premiered in Hong Kong in November of 2014, it already featured the tear-gassing footage that triggered the Umbrella Movement.

I was in Hong Kong through the month of November, visiting the Occupy zones as often as I could and conducting the majority of the interviews you saw in the film. Back in the US, I was interviewing international scholars such as Arif Dirlik, Andrew Nathan, and Ho-fung Hung. One interview with Benny Tai took place at Washington Square in New York after his workshop at the NYU Law School. Naturally I was aware that having just one camera—my cameraman's or Nate's—at any given time could not capture effectively the Umbrella Movement with its considerable duration and 3-zone spread, so I searched additional footage by recruiting videographers who have filmed Occupy.

Nora Lam came in as my assistant director/collaborator when I was back in HK to film the political showdown over Beijing's "universal suffragist" proposal at the Legislative Council. As the student reporter of HKU's Campus TV in 2014, and having made her own Umbrella short, Nora Lam was a great asset. (She has since matured into an excellent documentarian in her own right.)

My other Occupy collaborators, Thomas Leung, Kylie Tung, and Fox Fung, have contributed important zone footage. It goes without saying that archival research was indispensable. Significant material came from institutions such as SocREC, Apple Daily, and Delight Media. An unexpectedly tough struggle involved rights-clearance for Anthony Wong's concert footage, and that clip of Common giving a shout out to Hong Kong at the 2015 Oscar ceremony. And I ended up seeking legal advice from a First Amendment lawyer in New York for ensuring fair use. Those battles are long and complex, maybe let's go into them some other time.  

DT: The film's pretty long.

EC: A lot of other Umbrella films are long, even longer—Yellowing runs for two and a half hours, Almost a Revolution is three hours long. I’m fully aware of most people’s attention span in this internet age; therefore, when I started editing Raise the Umbrellas, I decided that it should not go over two hours…Now it’s just below two hours.

DT: Did you have to translate much of what you interviewed into English?

EC: No…It depends on what you mean by translating them… Of course, subtitles...

DT: The speeches.

EC: You know I interviewed Benny Tai, Martin Lee, Emily Lau, and Jasper Tsang in English…There have been some reaction to such a language decision among the Hong Kong audience. Of course, I don't want to make Hong Kong audience feel that this film is not made for them…
 
The fact is: I hope my interviewees and the Hong Kong audience won't mind me saying that. I actually feel that Benny and Martin and Emily speak better English than Cantonese... Anyway, they seemed to articulate themselves with more intellectual clarity when they spoke in English. We bilingual folks know that when one operates in more than one language, one draws upon different cultural assumptions depending on the language. While it’s important to “adapt one’s language” for different people, there is a danger of simplifying too much when these activists/politicians speak Cantonese to the grassroots community. Besides, I think that the local media or journalists are not too interested in citing certain references that they assume the readers are not interested in, or are not familiar with. For example, I always feel that Benny Tai’s reference to Martin Luther King’s Letters from Birmingham Jail as an important source for his conceptualization of a Hong Kong civil disobedience movement might not register with primarily Cantonese-speaking constituents.

DT: Right, sure.

EC: And by not referencing it, you actually are not seeing Hong Kong as part of the international political community, or as an important cultural crossroads where new ideas, concepts and movements arose since the 19th century.

DT: Right.

EC: So I feel that by getting them, especially for Martin and Benny, to speak in English to explain their intellectual sources about their understanding of civil disobedience, to explain how these concepts play out in Hong Kong and how they conceive democratic movement in Hong Kong, are important for us to understand the significance and lineage of the Umbrella Movement. One may say the Cantonese/Chinese vocabulary still hasn't quite caught up with their discussions. Don't forget that terms like civil disobedience or non-violent struggles are still relatively new entries in Cantonese/Chinese political parlance. That's why I asked them to speak in English. What I can do is to use Chinese subtitles to elucidate those concepts. Meanwhile, please remember that the three people I just mentioned are typical of what I would describe as the “cream of the crop.”

DT: From the colonial period.

EC: From the colonial era. They are “elites”…not exactly economic and social elites, but intellectual elites who ventured into politics. They are all people who have been shaped by the best that the colonial era has to offer. And that comes with certain understanding [of]…the central issues, the struggles, and the concept of democracy. Democracy—as a procedure and a norm practiced by some leading Western democracies—is not a homegrown concept. It did not come from the Chinese’s own culture. It did not come from the local vernacular culture. By that I’m not implying that Chinese culture doesn’t have its homegrown vision of political ideals. I’ve tried to address those issues in my films about Kang Youwei, notably in Datong: The Great Society.

DT: It didn't come from May 4th movement.

EC: It did not. Even the May 4th movement was influenced by certain international trends. So if getting these folks to speak in English can better elucidate the discussions, I'll go for that.

On the other hand, when I interview scholars like Arif Dirlik and Andrew Nathan you don't expect them to speak Cantonese… They can speak Mandarin. But is that the best medium for them to be interviewed? Finally, Raise the Umbrellas is a kind of bilingual documentary, though more in Cantonese than in English. Naturally, a number of interviewees express themselves better in Cantonese. For example, I don't always expect a young student Occupier to be speaking fluent English. That's where the language decision comes in concerning the interview.

DT: I had the same issue with that. I had to give a talk at the Hong Kong Reader, the cultural studies bookshop on the Sai Yeung Choi Street [in Kowloon], and they asked me to speak in Cantonese. But I'm talking about social activism and using some social science terms… I grew up here but I went to university in the United States and so I just didn't know how to express that sufficiently well in Cantonese.

EC: You cannot do simultaneous translation on your feet like that, maybe given some time to think about it [you can].. And that's exactly the issue we are talking about. If you asked Benny, Martin, and Emily questions in Cantonese, and let them switch to their familiar [Cantonese] terrain for most people in Hong Kong, some ideas would be lost…

I mean certain Chinese terms also have a different linguistic development in various regions [Hong Kong, Taiwan, Chinese mainland] .... Probably because of social media and the Internet, every linguistic system is evolving very rapidly. And at times to make a film for the local audience as well as for the international audience is a tricky proposition.

Meanwhile, we saw a top-down movement/policy from Beijing to mainlandize [Hong Kong]… meaning to really treat Cantonese as less and less the dominant language in daily use…And yet with social media, it's always about a vernacular communication traffic. Because of its immediacy, its mode of instant exchanges, social media intensifies local/vernacular identities. That’s why I think increasingly we seem to be witnessing the failure of so-called cultural “assimilation” among immigrants in most host countries in our contemporary world. The pressure, the mechanism or the incentive to downplay one’s own native culture in order to belong to the host culture is mostly missing. Everybody can carry her/his native culture in her/his pocket in that tiny smart phone. Today Hong Kong’s cultural conflicts with China arise partly from that intensification in both directions—I mean mainlandization as a public policy, and localization in private communication. The intensification of the local identity ultimately will have a profoundly public, political, or governance implication.[2]

DT: In your dramatic feature of 2001, The Map of Sex and Love, you took a close look at a personal gay relationship set on Lamma Island, Hong Kong. In the current documentary Raise the Umbrellas, you highlight the important role queer singers played in the Umbrella Movement. How have societal attitudes changed between then and now. Has the “personal” now become “political” in Hong Kong?

EC: To answer your question, maybe I should backtrack to talking about my directorial debut, To Liv(e) (1991), in which Anthony Wong, the queer Cantonpop icon and a leading activist during the Umbrella Movement, played the tortured lover in a relationship with an older woman, which is a trans-generational relationship that was socially ostracized and disapproved by the character’s family. That plot detail wasn't an invention but based on a real story that I've heard. The song I used in To Liv(e)—Forbidden Colors—was one of Anthony's signature tunes. It alluded to the pressure on relationships outside the social norm, which of course include gay and lesbian relationships. To Liv(e) was the first film I collaborated with Anthony, early on in our careers.

By the time I made The Map of Sex and Love during the turn of the millennia, Anthony was my first choice to play Wei-ming the overseas-educated gay protagonist. However, Anthony had already lost interest in acting, so I cast Bernardo Chow for that role. There are three interrelated stories in The Map, two of which are about the two gay characters. The story of Larry, the gay dancer, stems from his vengeful reaction to sexual repression. The drama of Wei-ming, a diasporic Hong Kong artist, is a) political/philosophical—involving an under-known Holocaust connection in Asia; and b) familial: Obviously he has come out to his father, but did Pa get it?

I guess The Map of Sex and Love explores both the meaning of guilt and the politics of recognition. Whereas, Umbrellas seems to be a "straight"—pun intended—political film. After all, it's about the good old fight for democracy. I found it most interesting that after seeing Umbrellas, so many audience members outside of Hong Kong have asked me—why is there a LGBT strand in the film? It strongly suggests that LGBT politics are still much ghettoized, outside the purview of "the mainstream," as though such struggles automatically belong to a subset, an ancillary part of the project of democracy. But why? Aren't equal rights a central concern of democracy?

In fact, one of the most remarkable phenomena within the Umbrella Movement were the unapologetic voices from a lesbian (Denise Ho) and a gay man (Anthony Wong)—the loudest, but almost the lone voices from Hong Kong's entertainment industry. Together they turned an emerging singer-songwriter's (Ah Pan’s) composition, Raise the Umbrellas, into the anthem of the Umbrella Movement.[3] They performed the song live at Occupy zones and created an ensemble recording posted online that has been heard by tens of thousands of people. Eventually that song was named the 2014 Favorite Song of The Year by Commercial Radio. It's not surprising that I essentially named the film after that song. For taking a stand, both Ho and Wong have been professionally penalized by the Beijing government. I think what distinguished their action from the old gay politics paradigm has to do with them being there, as openly gay citizens, to fight for democracy itself, not just addressing anti-discrimination or equal rights.

As a longtime New York resident, I had witnessed the unfolding of the same-sex marriage struggles in the US. You know for a while, the African American community resented the LBGTQ community using the civil rights movement as a model for their struggles. Apparently, one disfavored group doesn't necessarily sympathize with the plight of other disfavored groups. But there was no such enmity in Hong Kong between the LGBT activists and the student protest leaders, who actually showed up at the Pride parade—which took place during Occupy—to deliver a statement of support. Strikingly, Hong Kong democratic activists' coalition-building has turned the idea of "umbrella" into the literal symbol of inclusiveness.

Let's go back to my collaborations with Anthony Wong to gauge the progress of LGBT rights in Hong Kong. Anthony's Forbidden Colors, which alludes to taboo sex, was released in 1988, something like a quarter century before Anthony outed himself publicly at his own concert in 2012. And Raise the Umbrellas is the first film since To Liv(e) when I had a chance to work with him again. But look! He was playing himself—a cutting-edge performer, music-maker and democracy advocate who happens to be gay. I was quite moved by this actor/director "reunion" after two decades. 

DT: I am struck by the many visual depictions in the film, many of which I saw for the first time. Was that a deliberative effort to include lots of visuals, although you do have talking heads as well?

EC: Cinema is always about the interaction between image, sound and language. Inevitably, documentaries tend to be dominated by language, i.e. exposition, which often translates as talking heads. For me transcending the monotony of static talking heads is often one of my key creative challenges as a "documentarian," or, as I like to view myself, as a "filmic narrative artist." But my subject—the Umbrella Movement—is a visually striking event, albeit probably more by accident than by design. The 79-day Occupy, which transformed the cityscape, had become an unprecedented occasion to unleash Hong Kongers' creative energy, resulting in countless items of protest arts by citizen artists. Also, dancers, musicians converged at Occupy zone to celebrate the demand for democracy. It's not too hard to unearth interesting visuals for the film.

DT: Are you surprised that you couldn't present the film at Asia Society [Hong Kong Center on November 1, 2016]?

EC: Yes. I was…

DT: Because they've shown it before?

EC: They showed the short, work-in-progress 26-minute version of Umbrellas, along with To Liv(e), my first film—a full-length dramatic feature. That program took place in… 2015. [It was on 10 December 2015]. The occasion was to mark the Hong Kong University Press’s publication of a critical anthology about my work: Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan. For that occasion, the panelists included Gina Marchetti, from HKU’s Comp Lit department; Staci Ford, from HKU’s American Studies and History departments, and Michael Ingham, Professor of English at Lingnan U. Clearly, the political component of my work was not so upfront that evening.Of course, the event’s main offering was To Liv(e), which is about post-Tiananmen, post-June 4th Hong Kong. Each era has its own taboo. That was a huge taboo in China and remains so, but less so in Hong Kong these days and not at Asia Society that night…After all Hong Kong has been organizing the annual June 4th candlelight vigil from 1990 till today.

DT: So there was an early version of Umbrellas?

EC: Yes, there was a short… 26-minute version that had been shown at a couple of places, some universities—NYU, King’s College in London...

DT: After the Asia Society incident, one local university (Hong Kong University of Science Technology) banned a post-screening panel discussion, but allowed you to show the film there [on 20 November 2017]. Do you envision more censorship attempts?

EC: The more fundamental censorship problem in Hong Kong lies in the fact that it seems no longer possible for politically sensitive films to be released in commercial cinemas after the roaring success (or debacle) of Ten Years. Though there are other Umbrella films, mine is the one that ran into censorship problems repeatedly. The two censorship incidents, taking place a year apart, are both alarming and concerning. Asia Society canceled the film's Hong Kong premiere after claiming that the "imbalance" of the post-screening discussion panel had breached its "non-partisan" profile. But they had banned not only the panel discussion, but also the screening itself.[4] Whereas HKUST banned the panel for "bringing politics" into its campus, but allowed my film to be screened, which I accepted because reaching out to university students remains one of my goals.

I'd say that Asia Society actually was adopting a partisan position by cancelling the panel and screening, while HKUST has made a political decision in banning the panel. From an institutional perspective, they can always organize another event to counteract this Umbrella program. As for balance, I can't imagine them inviting protesters or opposition scholars to, say, a "one-belt-one-road" event. It is regrettable that Asia Society's "imbalance" assertion has at times been reported out of context. What happened was—Yes, I had Martin Lee, Benny Tai, and Nathan Law, Joshua Wong’s colleague and newly elected legislator, agreeing to be on the panel. Yet I had also invited the pro-Beijing Jasper Tsang to be a panelist, but he declined. That gave an opening to the "imbalance" charge. However, Tsang was a key interviewee in my film.

DT: How then do you respond to criticism that the film is “one-sided,” focusing on the protesters rather than the pro-Beijing side?

As I've mentioned, the "imbalance" charge has been falsely tagged from the panel onto my film. But of course, a few critics and some PRC students I encountered in the United States also latched onto that. I must say It is most ironic that among all the Umbrella documentaries that I'm aware of, mine is the only one that has offered space to include anti-Occupy voices throughout. For example, Almost a Revolution and Yellowing, as well as Teenager versus Superpower, the Netflix-acquired documentary about Joshua Wong, barely include pro-Beijing statements. Critics of my film should be aware that, first off, I'm not making a documentary about anti-Occupy, but about the occupation. Maybe they should ask themselves—why haven't there been filmmakers who feel passionate enough about the anti- Occupy cause to make films about it?

In my film, other than having Jasper Tsang as a key representative of the pro-Beijing camp, I've cited various statements by C.Y. Leung (Hong Kong's Chief Executive at the time), sound bites from other pro-government legislators such as Priscilla Mei-fun Leung, Starry Wai-king Lee. At least three student occupiers talked about their parents' objection (wrecking the economy and creating social chaos). I have a parent confronting some pan-democratic legislators for leading her children astray (by participating in Occupy), and endangering their future. I've filmed anti-Occupy protesters denouncing students, charging them of "getting paid." I've included an animation attacking Occupy for blocking traffic and causing inconvenience.

Pro-Beijing positions have been included, such as Jasper Tsang's claim that Beijing's "universalist suffragist" proposal was not "North Korean-style" election because Hongkongers have "more than one candidate to choose from." (China's decision was to allow no more than three candidates screened by Beijing to run for Chief Executive elections.) Or C.Y. Leung attacking Occupy as "illegal" or as an event stirred up by "foreign influence." Probably my film doesn't sit well with those critics because I have included experts' and Occupiers' rebuttals. Beijing's electoral package was "false democracy," asserted Martin Lee. Prof. Andrew Nathan debunked Beijing's assertion that the National Endowment for Democracy, of which he was a board member, orchestrated the Umbrella Movement. Benny Tai presented the concept of civil disobedience as a challenge to the very notion of legality or illegality by citing Martin Luther King.

My critics also ignored my efforts in presenting the starkly polarized social reality, i.e. the huge reservoir of discontent simmering in Hong Kong, as a backdrop to Occupy. Essentially, their points of view have been represented. Jasper Tsang has quite a bit of screen time. The reason those people singled out my film for criticism—and imposed censorship practices on it repeatedly—could be because the more fair-minded my approach is, the more threatening to their needs for not having to deal with a democratic uprising. Understandably a sizable segment of the Hong Kong population doesn't want protesters to rock the boat, meaning endangering their relative economic well-being—I do have an Occupier responding to that in the film though. All that I can say is the Hong Kong Occupy/Umbrella Movement erupted in such a massive way—easily one million people participating in various degrees—indicated that a significant portion of the citizenry felt enough is enough.

In fact, I think it's due to the film's anti-Occupy material that more than one Hong Kong reporter has asked me—what exactly my position was vis-a-vis Occupy, as though having made such a film, which was being censored and banned, is not in itself a statement. My philosophy in making films with a historical subject, be it about the late Qing reformer KangYouwei or the Umbrella Movement—which has by the way been folded into history already—has always been: I'm trying to understand why and how something happened, and not why something shouldn't have happened. The last thing I want to do is to wish away, counter-intuitively, some factual and historical incidents.

DT: Marxist historian Arif Dirlik appears in your film to talk about resistance movements like Occupy around the globe. After his death in December 2017 you have indicated you will dedicate future community screenings to him. Why is he an important figure to include in your documentary?

EC: Arif Dirlik was a friend and mentor of mine for some twenty years. He first approached me when he was editing the anthology, "China and Postmodernism." Professor Kwai-cheung Lo at Hong Kong Baptist University kindly mentioned me to him as someone from Hong Kong who both writes and makes films. At Arif's suggestion, I contributed the paper "Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema" to his book. A few years later, he invited me to a conference, prompting me to write the essay, "Zhang Yimou's 'Hero' and the Temptation of Fascism," which quickly became controversial and much cited later on. Arif was a rigorous scholar who was as disenchanted and critical of U.S. hegemony as about post-Mao China's absorption into the neo-liberal order of global capitalism. As a Turkish intellectual in exile and an expert on the origin and development of Chinese Marxism, he was among the shrewdest observers of global modernity in general and Chinese modernity in particular. His areas of expertise overlapped with my interests and concerns, so I ended up interviewing him in three of my films—my two part Kang Youwei docu-drama, Datong: The Great Society and Two or Three Things about Kang Youwei, as well as Raise the Umbrellas. He was also an advisor for these projects. 

It's a pity that I can include only some of his observations in this film Umbrellas. He had quite a bit to say about the comparative colonial experiences between Taiwan and Hong Kong, and his analysis of the evolution of Chinese state capitalism is very detailed and insightful. But I'm afraid a lot of these issues can be too technical and recondite for viewers without a strong academic background. What was left of his interview was mainly his situating of the Umbrella Movement within the global Occupy movements. In such a context, one can see Occupy in Hong Kong, as elsewhere, is a democratic struggle that encompasses both economic and political aspects of society. That's how we should understand one student occupier's question toward the end of my film: “Why are they creating a society that excludes the young?”

Arif remarked that democratic struggle is often a way of overcoming economic and social injustice caused by a corrupt system. Benny Tai echoed that view. I didn’t belabor the point by including what Tai has mentioned in one of his several interviews with me—that Occupy Central did at one time consider adding the issue of social inequality onto its platform, but ended up deciding to use universal suffrage as the defining tool to create a more responsive government. To my critics, I’d say that their emphasis on what kind of "views" have been included smacks of escapism—it's as though people either want to obfuscate or don't want to face up to the social and political dynamic that created the conditions for social unrest. It’s as though whether a momentous social event materializes or not is just a matter of "persuasive" arguments. Does anybody really believe that it was entirely due to Benny Tai or Joshua Wong's personal charisma or powerful rhetoric that tens of thousands of people would take to the street to confront tear-gassing and the police?

I would dedicate screenings of this film to memories of Arif as long as I could. However, the film itself has already been dedicated to Elsie Tu, a pioneer of Hong Kong democracy from the colonial era, whom I respected tremendously. Elsie had performed a lifetime service for the former colony, her roots in Hong Kong of course went much deeper than Arif's. But Arif was truly a friend of the Hong Kong people. After his passing, I came across an interview with Arif conducted by Lenny Kwok, Hong Kong's pioneering political rocker from the band Black Bird, in 2004. [5] In this interview, Arif expressed his wishes that "a placed-based identity, a place-based politics" would eventually happen in Hong Kong. Obviously, his wishes had been more than fulfilled by the furious rise of localization politics bred by the Umbrella Movement. One of the last things Arif did was to give me a brief statement in support of Raise the Umbrellas after it was banned by Asia Society. However, I didn't really have a chance or a platform to post it. Maybe now is the time:

“The Hong Kong chapter of Asia Society cancelled Evans Chan’s documentary film, Raise the Umbrellas, on the grounds that the panelists selected to discuss the film consisted only of those with pro-democracy views. This does not explain why the showing of the film itself should have been cancelled (I may note, for the record, that pro-Beijing politician Jasper Tsang Yuk-sing, who appeared in Chan’s film, turned down an invitation to participate in the panel discussion). It is revealing, and deeply disturbing, that administrators of Asia Society should indeed believe that discussion of democracy and free speech must be biased if it does not include the voices of those who would suppress them.”[6]

And in his last e-mail to me on September 11, 2017, Arif was fully aware of his imminent demise and encouraged me to "keep it up and don't let them silence you." He may have made my role sound more heroic than it actually is.

Meanwhile, it saddens me to think about this interview appearing in this website, when the founder of Jump Cut, Chuck Kleinhans, a dear professor and mentor of mine at Northwestern University, also passed away recently. Chuck's support and commitment to creating a platform for the under-represented, non-mainstream media and cinema had been long-standing and exemplary. After hearing the political troubles that my Umbrella film ran into, he expressed an interest in carrying an interview in "the upcoming issue." Unfortunately, he never had a chance to finalize this issue. Now it's left to Julia Lesage, Jump Cut's co-founder/editor and Chuck's lifetime partner, to carry on this task, and hopefully beyond this issue. Film scholar and media students need Jump Cut. All that I can say is had there been more people like Arif and Chuck, this world would have been a much, much better place. 

In memory of their intellectual courage, moral probity and mentoring, I'll do my best to bear witness to history through my tool and, if I may, art, as the battle between remembrance and forgetting, and particularly between remembrance and the active erasure of history is heating up at this cultural moment in so many corners of the globe.
 
Additional note by the interviewer DT:

It is tragic yet ironic that two transplants to Eugene, Oregon, Arif Dirlik and Chuck Kleinhans, passed away in December within weeks of each other. In fact, Chuck, with his loving partner Julia, had both commissioned this interview for Jump Cut a few weeks earlier. Ironically, the last e-mail from Chuck to me was his reaction to my tribute [7] to Arif, who was also a good comrade and fellow traveler who died on 1 December 2017.

Chuck e-mailed me 13 December 2017, a day before he passed away: “Dan, thanks for this interesting piece. I had seen Arif talk once at a conference—I think it was one David Li organized at U Oregon back in the 90s or so. I also first met Evans Chan there. I wasn’t aware of a permanent or recurring connection to [Hong Kong], so all of the rest is news to me…Best, Chuck.”

I regret I had never spoken in person with Chuck although I am sure I must have seen him at one conference or another since the 1970s, when I first personally subscribed to Jump Cut. I had been the research librarian at Temple University from 1978-1980, focusing on acquiring alternative press, including Jump Cut, and since 1986 a film studies bibliographer at various times at UC Irvine. Hence I feel forever indebted to Chuck for his raising early awareness of queer and Third World cinemas in his writings in Jump Cut especially. This interview in this issue hopefully serves as a tribute to him.

Notes

1. An English voice-over and updated version of Raise the Umbrellas is completed in 2018. Meanwhile, scheduled screenings include NYU on February 21, Pomona College on February 28, UCLA on March 1, SOAS University of London on March 16, UC-Santa Barbara on May 30, and the Berlin Literature Festival on September 8. [return to text]

2. See Sebastian Veg, “Legalistic and Utopian: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.” New Left Review 92, March-April 2015, pp. 55-73.

3. http://www.interlude.hk/front/music-fuelled-occupy-hong-kong/

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/world/asia/hong-kong-umbrella-revolution-film.html

5. [Kwok], Lenny. “WTO Protests, Place-based Democracy, Tiananmen & 7-Chinas: The Arif Dirlik Interview,” Blackbird: Body of Work 1984-2004. Hong Kong: Ming Pao Weekly, 2007. See also, Arif Dirlik’s August/September 2016 paper
 (http://icaps.nsysu.edu.tw/ezfiles/122/1122/img/2375/CCPS2(2)-Dirlik.pdf)

6. Arif Dirlik's e-mail to Evans Chan, July 10, 2017

7. http://subversities.blogspot.hk/2017/12/remembering-historian-arif-dirlik.html