Blue Island
Top Films of 2022
•
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 Top Films of 2022
-
Strange Victory
Directed by Leo Hurwitz • Documentary • With Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill • 1948 • 71 minutes
The year was 1945. The free world rejoices over the defeat of fascism. But the peace soon chilled, and in the Cold War that followed the United States entered a period of national paranoia a...
-
On the Bowery
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • Documentary • With Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews • 1956 • 65 minutes
On the Bowery chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row. When the film first opened in 1956, it exploded on t...
-
Foucault Against Himself
Directed by Francois Caillat • Documentary • With Michel Foucault • 2014 • 52 minutes
From the history of madness, to sexuality and pleasure in classical antiquity, to the law and penal institutions, the breadth of Michel Foucault's thought was astonishing.
One of the leading intellectuals of t...
