Guildford, UK: University of Surrey, 2021. 1 online resource (76 min.).
Black Bauhinia is a documentary directed by international politics scholar Malte Kaeding. The film was produced over the span of three years and premiered at the 12th Hong Kong Independent Film Festival in 2020, followed by a series of screenings at film festivals, conferences, and university campuses worldwide.
The documentary “traces the political awakening of a generation [which] at its heart has one idea: localism” (intertitle). While the documentary presents a substantial number of interviews with academics, professionals, activists, and politicians from a diverse political spectrum, Edward Tin-kei Leung (b. 1991) and Ray Toi-yeung Wong (b. 1993), pro-democracy activists and co-founders of the localist political group Hong Kong Indigenous, are the film’s central focus. From first-person testimonies, vlogs, and handwritten letters, to interviews and newsreels, they share personal stories about their aspirations and the determination of a young generation of Hongkongers whose political participation has been impeded by external power and disproportionate forces. Retrospectively, the documentary portrays the costs and sacrifices one ultimately bears when pursuing personal and political ideals in post-handover Hong Kong, amidst the tightening space in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. After Leung and Wong’s involvement in the 2016 Mong Kok Civil Unrest, they are charged with rioting and assault and ordered to stand trial in 2017. Leung chooses to stay to face his punishment (six years in prison), while Wong embarks on a journey of self-exile and is later granted political asylum in Germany in 2018.
With reference to the six documentary modes proposed by Bill Nichols in Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, 2017), Black Bauhinia was filmed in an expository narrative style that emphasizes rhetorical content in which voices and images are presented as evidence. The main arc is Wong and Leung’s thoughts and commentaries, which are illustrated by related footage and testimonies. The documentary intelligently provides several implicit and explicit visual and audio cues that foreground the narratives, which differ from official discourse. One of these cues is the sounding of the now-banned slogan “revolution of our time” in the soundtrack—an expression that gained unprecedented currency a few years after being coined by Leung and Wong. In this regard, the film is multilayered. It opens with familiar footage of the 1997 handover ceremony for the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including the hoisting of the red bauhinia flag, representing the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, for the first time. The stylized white bauhinia flower against a red backdrop had five petals, each with a red five-pointed star that paid homage to the PRC. The documentary chose to replace the national anthem that was performed at the venue with a subtle, almost sentimental instrumental music score. As the image fades, the film evokes another iconic yet contrasting moment on the symbolic date, but 22 years later in 2019. A raw video in vertical mode, which was likely taken by a mobile phone, captures the unfurling of a black bauhinia flag in the city.
According to the film, the black bauhinia connotes “the fear that Hong Kong is dying.” Viewed as a symbol of defiance by the authorities, the black bauhinia flag has been seen in various forms. For example, the version that appears on the film poster shows a white bauhinia flower without the stars but with wilting petals against a black backdrop. With the flag as an entry point, narrator and veteran political commentator Joseph Lian explains in a voice-over the course of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement and the discontent of the pro-democracy population in Hong Kong. After mentioning the passing of the National Security Law (NSL) in Hong Kong in 2020, the film rewinds to 2017, with the then-24-year-old Wong giving his first testimony for the documentary by introducing himself and describing his political involvement as something unexpected, recalling his transformation from a timid and shy child to a vocal spokesperson of Hong Kong Indigenous, which he co-founded in 2015. Then we see footage of Wong walking with Leung on the streets of Hong Kong, a visual and narrational transition that introduces Leung, who then traces his political awakening to his first June 4th vigil at the age of seventeen. The image, among many others documented by the film, serves as a memorialization of a scene or an event that is unlikely to take place again given the current political landscape. By 2023, most of the featured interviewees either were jailed or had left Hong Kong.
Towards the end of the film, Wong’s voice-over switches between Cantonese and German, while Leung’s letters from prison are read by his sister. Localism, according to Leung in one of his last interviews before being imprisoned, is broadly understood as the inseparable “relationship between body and land,” while Wong, in a letter to Leung written one day after the activation of the NSL, reiterates their shared aspiration to “protect all the people and things that gives us [them] the feeling of home.” Closing this circular timeline by returning to 2020 in its concluding scenes, the film offers an in-depth insider and nuanced account of the organic trajectories partaken by localism as a movement, a discourse, and even a structure of feeling in post-handover Hong Kong, within and outside the city. The fact that the documentary would make only one official appearance in Hong Kong shows the precarious state of the subject matter it explored and challenged in the articulation of the political and the personal. Just as bauhinia, bionomically known as bauhinia × blakeana, is a plant that originated in Hong Kong and is hybrid in nature, the Chinese-language title of the documentary, Heung Gong bun sik 香港本色, literally means the “true colours of Hong Kong,” calling to mind the salutation to brotherhood and courage in director John Woo’s Hong Kong action film classic A Better Tomorrow (1986), aka Ying hung bun sik 英雄本色.
Helena Wu
University of British Columbia, Vancouver