1.
Beneath the calm surface of Hong Kong in 2025 lies the weight of dramatic upheaval. After the 2019 anti-extradition protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Security Law, the “patriots governing Hong Kong” policy, and the passage of the Article 23 National Security Ordinance, the open and free Hong Kong many remember seems to be fading from view. This year also marks the tenth anniversary of the independent film Ten Years, once dubbed a “prophecy” about Hong Kong’s future.
Ten Years consists of five short films—Extras, Season of the End, Dialect, Self-Immolator, and Local Egg. Though each stands on its own, together they offer a speculative vision of what Hong Kong might look like a decade later. Since the film premiered at the end of 2015, its imagined future—ten years ahead—falls squarely on this year: 2025. In that sense, the year 2025 has become, thanks to this film, an inescapable reference point in Hong Kong’s history.
Released one year after the Umbrella Movement, Ten Years was both a work of art and a political intervention. It imagined and rehearsed a possible future for Hong Kong—an act that, in retrospect, resonates strongly with the 2019 protests. For those who participated in that struggle, the imagined world of the film wasn’t fantasy—it felt real. That imagining was an attempt to create the possibility of a different future. And by 2025, many of those fictional scenarios have become reality.
Back in 2015, Ten Years may have seemed dystopian, even absurd. But in the wake of the 2020 National Security Law, it now appears almost restrained.
The sense of absurdity the film evoked was something widely shared by viewers in 2015, and the creators leaned into that tone. The film opens with a stark black screen and a disclaimer: “The following content is a fictional work” and “Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.” At the same time, however, the authorial voice fades into the background, and the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. The viewer is left to decide: is this a record or an invention? Fiction or truth?
Thus, for those familiar with Hong Kong’s reality, the fictional Ten Years may have felt more real than any documentary. For outsiders, the film might seem “entirely absurd” or accused of “spreading despair”—as China’s Global Times once described it.
Watching Ten Years now, in 2025, as imagination becomes reality, we can better see what was “absurd” about the film. Its absurdity didn’t stem from exaggerated artistic techniques or distortions of reality. It lay in the fact that what it called fiction became the lived experience of many.
This absurdity didn’t come from the imagination of art or literature—it came from reality itself. For many in Mainland China, this kind of absurd reality has long become a familiar part of everyday life (as seen, for instance, in the Kafkaesque absurdities of pandemic lockdowns). But for Hong Kong, this absurdity is new, raw, sharp. Perhaps that’s why the creators of Ten Years were able to imagine a future that, for most at the time, still felt like fantasy. Their insight accurately predicted the direction of Hong Kong’s political shift and outlined a future—this future, in 2025—where the city would lose its freedom.
Film still from Ten Years
2.
(The following section contains only minor spoilers.)
The most intense aspect of Hong Kong politics has always been the confrontation between street-level resistance and state repression. The short film Self-Immolator was inspired by the 2014 Umbrella Movement, but it takes a more radical turn by imagining a future shaped by calls for Hong Kong independence. It’s as if the filmmakers foresaw that, under authoritarian rule, some Hong Kongers would be driven toward ever more extreme forms of resistance. Before the National Security Law came into effect in 2020, the phrase “Hong Kong independence is the only way out” had already become a widely chanted slogan during protests. After the law’s passage, just uttering those words could land someone in prison for sedition.
The brief scene in Self-Immolator showing police deploying tear gas seems less reminiscent now of the Umbrella Movement in 2014 than of the 2019 anti-extradition protests. The figure of the “self-immolator”—someone who gives their life to protest political darkness—also became all too real when Hong Kong activist Leung Ling-kit leapt off a building on June 15, 2019.
For Hong Kong, repression doesn’t only come in the form of brute force—it also seeps in more subtly, through infiltration and fear. In Extras, one of the most chilling moments involves the mention of “2020” and the words “National Security Law.” The short imagines a regime using fear to push through national security legislation—“the more afraid people are, the better.” But in real life, it wasn’t the people who were afraid in 2019—not even in the face of tear gas, arbitrary arrests, or the horrifying events of July 21 and August 31. It was the authorities who feared the public’s political demands, and in response, rushed the law into existence.
Local Egg imagines a newly emergent censorship regime in Hong Kong. In this short, squads of uniformed children, dressed like Red Guards, patrol neighborhoods, enforcing ideological discipline. Even the word “local” becomes forbidden, though “Hong Kong” itself is not yet a banned term. In reality, however, the censorship has proven even more absurd: the word “Hong Kong” has become sensitive within Hong Kong itself. For instance, at the 2021 Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon, the slogan “Go Hong Kong!” was banned from banners and clothing. In the film, the child patrols carry a blacklist of banned words, but in the “beautiful new Hong Kong” of real life, the shifting, invisible red lines have created a climate of censorship and self-censorship even more suffocating than that found in Mainland China, where people are at least used to navigating such boundaries.
Dialect, as the title suggests, explores the marginalization of Cantonese in Hong Kong. In recent years, the status of Cantonese has declined, while Mandarin’s presence has grown. Given China’s rising economic influence, this change might seem natural—perhaps even inevitable. But what Dialect fears is not a gradual shift in language use, but the forced imposition of Mandarin by the authorities. While the current promotion of Mandarin hasn’t reached the level imagined in the film, the deeper message has proven accurate: the erosion of Hong Kongers’ mother tongue mirrors the erosion of their say in deciding the future. Their native language may still be intact—but meaningful self-governance has already disappeared.
Season of the End is perhaps the most abstract and difficult of the five shorts, and the only one that seems detached from Hong Kong’s immediate social reality. It focuses on a couple who collect and preserve specimens. The male protagonist eventually asks his partner to preserve him as a specimen. She reacts vehemently, arguing that specimens are meant to preserve the shape of the dead—not destroy the life of the living. He replies, “What about me? Am I dying or living?”
This short can be read as a metaphor for the film’s own purpose: Ten Years is a record, and what is recorded must already be part of the past—it must already be “dying.” Yet Ten Years was made to capture something “living”—the present of 2015—and preserve it for the future. Because by 2025, such records might no longer be possible. And so, in 2015, while Hong Kong was still “living,” its filmmakers created a specimen of the city.
Film still from Ten Years
3.
What Ten Years expresses is a deep sense of political depression under encroaching authoritarianism. This sense of despair is hardly unfamiliar to people in Mainland China—though you won’t find anything quite as direct as Ten Years in Mainland art or cinema. In the film, government agents from Beijing conspire to create violent incidents in Hong Kong to heighten fear, theories of “Hong Kong independence” and their slogans are front and center, and uniformed children resembling Red Guards march through the city enforcing ideological purity. This is a portrait of hopelessness: a feeling of powerlessness in the face of one’s political condition and the trajectory of the nation—a darkness in which history seems to have ended, the sun will never rise again, and all resistance feels futile.
But if everything is so bleak, then what’s the point of a film like Ten Years? What was the point of all those moments when so many Hong Kongers stood up—against Article 23, against national education, in the Umbrella Movement, in the 2019 protests?
The film itself offers an answer—through a line in Self-Immolator:
“It’s not about whether it’s possible; it’s about whether it’s right or wrong.”
This phrase, spoken by a fictional independence activist, also encapsulates the choice made by many real-life Hong Kong people who joined in protest. What they pursued was not success, but justice. They didn’t act because they thought they would win. They acted because it was the right thing to do.
From the Umbrella Movement, to the anti-extradition protests, to the “Five Demands,” to the shouted cry of “Hong Kongers, revenge!”—people took to the streets in search of a more just system, or to stop the escalating injustices plaguing an open and free society. (Anyone familiar with the tradition of Chinese folklore heroes will understand that “revenge” in this context is not mere vengeance, but a moral response to intolerable injustice in a world without recourse.)
However, in Mainland China, lived experience has taught people that any attempt to seek justice at the expense of authority or the powerful is almost always futile and self-destructive. This ingrained fear, passed down through generations, has created an instinctive aversion to opposing injustice and to pursuing justice. Living under a system lacking justice, people are left with little choice but to focus on their own material interest. This is the only kind of interest that the powerful allow most people to see and care about—an interest that, even when attained, offers no guarantee of dignity or justice.
Justice and material interest, of course, aren’t necessarily opposed. But many who watched the Hong Kong protests from the outside couldn’t make sense of the motivation. If the protestors aren’t being paid, if they are not getting something out of it, why would they protest? This attitude reflects just how thoroughly the pursuit of justice has been suppressed in those observers’ everyday imagination. In a system where justice has long been absent, people find it easier to believe protestors are bought than to imagine they are motivated by principle.
But what Hong Kong people were fighting for was justice—something that maximizes the benefits for everyone in society, especially ordinary citizens. Because only a just society allows everyone to live with dignity. Only a just society isn’t governed by the law of the jungle.
Hong Kong was once a mirror that allowed the Mainland to see itself more clearly. Today, it has become—at least in some sense—a specimen. But that specimen preserves the traces of resistance, the principles that drove it, and the values that once defined what it meant to be Hong Kong. We need imaginative works like Ten Years, and we need to understand what Hong Kong people were fighting for—and how—if we want to truly understand what justice is. Only when individuals begin making the choice to act, because it’s the right thing to do, can a society begin to move toward justice.
The last decade has been punishing for those who believe in justice: in Hong Kong, in Mainland China, and around the world. Not many in the Mainland have seen Ten Years, but many have now lived the future it imagined. In fact, it didn’t even take ten years: in Hong Kong, the prophecy came true in just five or six. Like the Mainland, Hong Kong too has slipped into what some call the “garbage time of history.”
The past decade may have been grim, but that doesn’t mean Ten Years will last forever. What happens in the next ten years—or five years, or one year—depends on how many more people come to understand justice—and how to fight for it.