To listen to our interview with Director Matthew Torne on Subversity Online, click:here. Documentary available for viewing via UCI on-site or via VPN: Kanopy streaming. May also be available at other academic web sites.
Oxford-educated scholar (his Master's thesis was on Hong Kong politics) turned documentary filmmaker Matthew Torne's "Lessons in Dissent" (whom he also co-produced) deftly portrays two dedicated teenagers fighting the moneyed Hong Kong establishment and special administrative region's Beijing masters. It's a study in contrasts and a striking depiction of a new generation of young activists and protesters in a very politicized Hong Kong. Some spectacular footage is included.
Media-savy teenager Joshua Wong
Focusing not on the recent Umbrella Revolution or Movement, Torne details the struggle in Hong Kong against the proposed imposition of what critics termed brain-washing and propagandistic, a mainland China-dictated National Education in Hong Kong school curricula.
One figure portrayed is the media savy 15-year-old schoolboy Joshua Wong Chi-fung (黃之鋒), the convenor of Scholarism, and who led the fight against National Education in 2011, and who also was a key figure in last Fall's Umbrella Movement.
The more radical Ma Jai is shown being arrested
In striking contrast is the more below the
radar and less known Ma Wan-ke (馬雲棋) (nicknamed
"Ma Jai" (馬仔) a 17-year-old secondary school dropout (from the same school
and housing estate as the more mainstream Joshua
Wong), who while lacking Mr. Wong's more sophisticated political analysis
(spoken in the film in Cantonese, with English subtitles), nonetheless is able
to offer biting observations that prove that he is able to be well read and
educated despite Hong Kong's at times stultifying education system. He is
an active member of the more anarchistic League
of Social Democrats.
Matthew Torne at UC Irvine 25 February 2015; Photo c Daniel C. Tsang 2015
For Subversity Show Online, show host Daniel C. Tsang interviewed Director Matthew Torne earlier today from London via Skype. Torne had shown his documentary before several dozen students at UC Irvine the Wednesday before. Meanwhile, Joshua Wong was featured in the L.A. Times after their visit to UCLA.
Protest leader Joshua Wong
On Subversity,Torne offers a critical analysis of the current political situation in Hong Kong in the aftermath of last fall's uprising. He explains why he chose the two young protesters to feature in his film and offers some trunchent analysis of the People's Republic of China as Hong Kong's new colonial masters.
Joshua Wong with Lessons in Dissent DVD
The DVD was just released in Hong Kong; the boxed set comes with two DVDs (the documentary plus outakes) and a 96-page booklet with trenchant analyses of the political situation in Hong Kong. - Daniel C. Tsang.
Cantonese-speaking New Zealander Roseanne Liang's first major feature film, My Wedding and Other Secrets, takes a dramatic look back at her own courtship of Stephen (called James in the film), a tall and nerdy, white New Zealander, played by Matt Whelan. Her parents, originally from Hong Kong, would rather she marry another Chinese person, but a solution is at hand. If the prospective son-in-law would learn "basic Mandarin", Dr. Chu, the family patriarch played by Kenneth Tsang (no relation to the blog author), would agree to the marriage proposal. Dr. Chu eventually tells James that being from Hong Kong, the family speaks Cantonese, but he learned Mandarin as well.
It is strange for a Cantonese speaking family to want a son-in-law to speak Mandarin, given that the entire family speaks Cantonese (and English) in the film, including the daughter portraying the director, called in the film Emily Chu (played by Michelle Ang), who had refused to learn Mandarin.
The film is funny to watch and it was refreshing to hear Cantonese spoken in a Chinese-New Zealander-directed film. Liang was born in Auckland, NZ. The main characters are welll supported by a strong supporting cast of Emily's sisters and Matt's housemates, as well as, especially, Eric, played by Simon Londn, as the queer acting fellow film student of Emily's.
Photo, right: Matt fixates his gaze on to Emily.
The film starts off with Emily trying to do a film project at school about the relationship, which she tries to hide from her parents, to the distress of her boyfriend. She also declines to sleep overnight at James' place, while they are dating. This feature film (88 mins) takes off from Liang's original 2005 documentary of the same relationship (called Banana in a Nuthell).
In the Q and A after the recent showing at the Newport Beach Film Festival, featuring two ethnic Chinese actors from the film (one from Los Angeles, the other from Australia), in response to my query as to why the father would want the future relative to learn Mandarin, there was the suggestion that Mandarin is the future since China is taking over the world.
That may well be, but the NBFF volunteer who led the discussion committed a grievous and insulting faux pas, trying to explain why the man did not learn Cantonese, but in the process, she revealed her own ignorance, leaving one to wonder why she was picked to lead that Q and A.
What she said was amazingly rude and ignorant. She said it's because "Cantonese is a gutter language"! Elaborating, she argued that unlike Mandarin, which is a written language, Cantonese is a language of the streets, full of slang.
Her ignorance of Cantonese is no doubt attributable to her four years of language training in Mandarin, where the instructor undoubtedly misled her into believing that Cantonese is not a written language. In fact, as the many books published in Hong Kong and the overseas Chinese diaspora indicate, Cantonese can be and is written, as I daily encounter in chatting with my Cantonese friends online.
In addition, one of the actors claimed that Cantonese is only spoken in southern China and Hong Kong, ignoring the fact that it is one of the languages spoken by most Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in over a century, in Vancouver, and also in Southeast Asia.
I am glad director Rosseanne Liang was not present to hear the NBFF representative's insulting comments. It was a disappointing prelude to the Asian films shown that evening at the Pacific Rim Showcase, and the Fashion Island party afterwards, both of which I skipped as a result. - Daniel C. Tsang.
