Blue Island
Across Asia
•
1h 37m
Directed by CHAN Tze Woon • Documentary • 2022 • 98 minutes
BLUE ISLAND documents three people who engaged in rebellions when they were young. Through reconstructing these events, the film dramatizes their scarred memories and experiences by using four young people who participated in the 2019 Anti-extradition Law Amendment Movement in Hong Kong. These real protagonists are separated by time and history, yet their lives parallel and overlap, because they have similarly defiant backgrounds and find themselves the same chaotic predicaments.
Images flow between documentary and drama, blending archival materials, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. How do the young people envision their future? What do they think about this seemingly unwinnable revolution?
Conceived in 2017 and filmed over 5 years, BLUE ISLAND confronts the large-scale 2019 protests in Hong Kong. A new wave of young people take back the streets, as one generation after another has done throughout Hong Kong’s history. The past, the present and the future converge within a relentlessly documenting lens.
“Deeply rewarding… poignant, personal stories. Constructs a sweeping history of dissent in Hong Kong over the course of decades.” —Redefine Magazine
—New Directors New Films 2022
—Best Documentary, CAAM FEST 2022
—Best International Feature Documentary Award, Hot Docs 2022
Up Next in Across Asia
-
Island in Between
Directed by S. Leo Chiang • Documentary • 2023 • 20 minutes
The rural Taiwanese outer islands of Kinmen sit merely 2 miles off the coast of China. Kinmen attracts tourists for its remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War. It also marks the frontline for Taiwan in its escalating tension with Chin...
-
Education and Nationalism
Directed by Hisayo Saika • Documentary • 2023 • 108 minutes
A group of uniformed Japanese schoolchildren make their way to class. But what they will be taught when they get there is a subject increasingly under government scrutiny.
EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM traces growing government interventio...
-
The Story Of Hong Gil-Dong
Directed by Dong-heon Shin • Animation • 1967 • 67 minutes
South Korea's first ever animated feature, this epic adventure has been remastered and released for the first time ever in North America! The illegitimate son of a nobleman, banished from his family due to a fake prophecy, Hong Gil-dong ...
