With only a few days to go before the 25th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, the brainwashing propaganda of the pro-Communist camp follows one after another.
Two-time Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Short Film, British director Malcolm Clarke recently released a series of documentaries about the 2019 Anti-extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement “Hong Kong Returns.” Film critics said that although the documentary pretended to be objective and neutral, its pro-CCP (Chinese Communist Party) stance was obvious, and it was just a repackaged publicity campaign in an attempt to whitewash the CCP bad deeds and smear the social movement.
The first two episodes of the documentary, “Hong Kong People Take to the Streets” and “The Problem of British Colonial History,” were uploaded to the pro-CCP media Hong Kong 01 website on June 23, 2022.
The first episode explained the background of Hong Kong’s handover of sovereignty in 1997, and the cause of the social movement in 2019 originated from the “Murder of Poon Hiu-wing case” (which happened in Taiwan but the suspect flew back to Hong Kong). The amendment incident, and a series of social movements broke out after that.
The second episode described that Hong Kong was ceded to the United Kingdom after the Opium War, and how the British government made money by exploiting Hong Kong; the British Hong Kong Government began to reform after the “1967 Hong Kong riots,” and promoted Hong Kong’s autonomy in the early 1990s; The clips also mentioned the protest against national education in 2012, the Umbrella Movement that occurred in 2014 and other social movements later.
However, the first two episodes of the documentary showed almost no clips of police suppressing demonstrations even though the police of using excessive force.
There were only clips of demonstrators using petrol bombs, clashing with police, and destroying streets in 2019, as well as scenes of pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council clashing with pro-establishment members in the council chamber.
The documentary also interviewed various people, but their views were all pro-establishment positions, and no interviews with no pro-democracy politicians were shown.
Director: Western Media is Biased
In an exclusive interview with Hong Kong 01, Malcolm said that the western media’s reports on the 2019 social movement in Hong Kong were untrue, inaccurate and biased, so he hoped that his documentary could supplement the unreported side of the mainstream media, so that the audience could think again.As for the fact that the documentary did not show clips of interviews with pro-democracy figures, he explained that he tried to talk to figures from various camps, but due to the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law, some interviews that he thought were very good could not be broadcasted in the end, “this is an issue in Hong Kong. It is difficult to have two sides in balance.”
Documentary Films for CCP in Shanghai
Malcolm, 70, is a British director. In 2014, he won his second Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film for “The Lady in No. 6” which is about the oldest survivor of the Holocaust.In 2021, Malcolm revealed in an interview with media in Shanghai that he had lived in Shanghai for about seven years. In other words, he has been living in Shanghai since about 2014.
In the same year, he mentioned in an interview with Chinese state-run media China Culture Daily that he first came to mainland China in the 1980s and lived in China for nine months. Since then, he has fallen in love with China. Since 2013, he has focused his work on China.
In the same year, Malcolm even became a guest on the first episode of the CCP-produced program “The Centennial Party—Foreigners Telling Stories,” saying that in recent years, reports from Western countries had biased and misunderstood China, which was not the China he saw. So he used a camera to show the real China to the world.
Malcolm is also a team member of “ARTeFACT Entertainment,” which produces documentaries about China. Some of his works are supervised by the State Council Information Office of China.
Film Critic: Repackaging Propaganda to Whitewash CCP
Film critic Ben Lam Siu-pan described in an interview with the Epoch Times that this English-language documentary repackaged the CCP’s recent “foreign propaganda” trying to whitewash the ills of the CCP and smear the protest movement in Hong Kong.In his view, the target audience of the film is not Hongkongers, but people from Western countries such as Europe and the United States. He “admired” that the CCP was able to “invite” the Academy Award winning director to film “propaganda” and countered the documentary “Revolution of the Times” that won international applause.
He pointed out that although the documentaries pretended to be objective and neutral, its pro-Communist stance is obvious. For example, in the first episode, through numerous pro-establishment interviewees, the clip first criticized the government for failing to realize that the public’s opposition was so strong when it revised the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance in 2019, and then criticized many protesters for not reading it and over-panic on the Ordinance. Later the peaceful demonstrations turned into “violent rebellion,” damaging Hong Kong’s economy.
The objective of the clip is to make the audience feel that the protesters in 2019 are unreasonable, he said, and went on to give further comments on the documentary:
In the second episode, the narrator and pro-establishment interviewees blamed the British colonial government for exploiting Hongkongers to make money, and in the early 1990s suddenly encouraging Hongkongers to self-govern with democracy, the British Hong Kong government failing to deal with livelihood issues such as the disparity between the rich and the poor, and the power of self-governing of Hong Kong in 2014 was greater than that of the British in Hong Kong.
Even the analysis in the episode suggested that various anti-CCP social movements broke out in Hong Kong because Hongkongers were jealous of the rise of China’s economy; and an unidentified poll cited that 62 percent of Hongkongers supported the handover of sovereignty to China.
Ben was worried that some European and American audiences would support the CCP’s suppression of Hongkongers because the documentary was filmed by an Academy Award winning director, and the film also pretended to be objective and neutral.
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