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For decades, Hong Kongs movie industry has enthralled global audiences with balletic shoot-em-ups, epic martial-arts fantasies, chopsocky comedies and shadow-drenched romances. Now, under orders from Beijing, local officials will scrutinize such works with an eye toward safeguarding the Peoples Republic of China.

The citys government on Friday said it would begin blocking the distribution of films that are deemed to undermine national security, marking the official arrival of mainland Chinese-style censorship in one of Asias most celebrated filmmaking hubs.

The new guidelines, which apply to both domestically produced and foreign films, come as a sharp slap to the artistic spirit of Hong Kong, where government-protected freedoms of expression and an irreverent local culture had imbued the city with a cultural vibrancy that set it apart from mainland megacities.

They also represent a broadening of the Chinese governments hold on the global film industry. Chinas booming box office has been irresistible to Hollywood studios. Big-budget productions go to great lengths to avoid offending Chinese audiences and Communist Party censors, while others discover the expensive way what happens when they do not.

Hong Kongs storied movie industry is as much a pillar of its identity as its food, its soaring skyline or its financial services sector.

During its peak as a filmmaking capital in the decades after World War II, the city churned out immensely popular genre flicks and nurtured auteurs like Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui. It has minted international stars such as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau and Tony Leung. The influence of Hong Kong cinema can be seen in the work of Hollywood directors including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, and in blockbusters such as The Matrix.

Censorship worries have loomed large over Hong Kongs creative industries ever since the former British colony was returned to China in 1997. But concerns that once felt theoretical have become frighteningly real since Beijing enacted a national security law last year to quash the antigovernment protests that shook the city in 2019.

So while few in the local movie industry said they felt caught totally off guard by the new censorship guidelines issued Friday, they still expressed concern that the sweeping scope of the rules would affect not just which movies are screened in Hong Kong, but also how they get produced and whether they get made at all.

How do you raise funds? asked Evans Chan, a filmmaker who has faced problems screening his work in the city. Can you openly crowdsource and say that this is a film about certain points of view, certain activities?

Even feature filmmakers, he said, will be left to wonder in tense anticipation whether their movies will fall afoul of the security law. Its not just a matter of activist filmmaking or political filmmaking, but the overall scene of filmmaking in Hong Kong.

The censorship directives are the latest sign of how thoroughly Hong Kong is being reshaped by Beijings security law, which took aim at the citys pro-democracy protest movement but has had crushing implications for aspects of its very character.

With the blessing of the Communist government, the Hong Kong authorities have changed school curriculums, pulled books off library shelves and moved to overhaul elections. The police have arrested pro-democracy activists and politicians as well as a high-profile newspaper publisher.

And in the arts, the law has created an atmosphere of fear.

The updated rules announced Friday require Hong Kong censors considering a film for distribution to look out not only for violent, sexual and vulgar content, but also for how the film portrays acts which may amount to an offense endangering national security.

Anything that is objectively and reasonably capable of being perceived as endorsing, supporting, promoting, glorifying, encouraging or inciting such acts is potential grounds for deeming a film unfit for exhibition, the rules now say.

The new rules do not limit the scope of a censors verdict to a films content alone.

When considering the effect of the film as a whole and its likely effect on the persons likely to view the film, the guidelines say, the censor should have regard to the duties to prevent and suppress act or activity endangering national security.

A Hong Kong government statement on Friday said: The film censorship regulatory framework is built on the premise of a balance between protection of individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and the protection of legitimate societal interests on the other.

The vagueness of the new provisions is in keeping with what the security laws critics say are its ambiguously defined offenses, which give the authorities wide latitude to target activists and critics.

Tin Kai-man, of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, told the local broadcaster TVB that the industry needed to better understand whether the censors decisions could be appealed after, for instance, they had ruled that a movie could not be shown in Hong Kong because of national security risks.

All of this must first be made clear, Mr. Tin said. We dont want this thing to come in and grow out of control so we start worrying about the impact on movie production.

The new censorship guidelines announced Friday seem directed in part at one specific kind of movie. They say censors should give extra scrutiny to any film that purports to be a documentary or to report on real events with immediate connection to the circumstances in Hong Kong.

Why? The local audience may likely feel more strongly about the contents of the film.

Censors, according to the guidelines, should carefully examine whether the film contains any biased, unverified, false or misleading narratives or presentation of commentaries.

That could spell tougher scrutiny for movies like Ten Years, a low-budget independent production from 2015 that offered dystopian tales of life in a 2025 Hong Kong that is crumpling under Beijings grip. It might also put a chill on documentarians efforts to chronicle Hong Kongs political turmoil.

A short documentary about the 2019 protests, Do Not Split, was nominated for an Academy Award this year, raising global awareness about Chinas crackdown in the city. (The films nomination may have played a role in Hong Kong broadcasters deciding not to air the Oscar broadcast this year for the first time in decades, although one station called it a commercial decision.)

Efforts to bring other politically themed documentaries before audiences in Hong Kong in recent months have become engulfed in bitter controversy.

A screening of a documentary about the 2019 protests was canceled at the last minute this year after a pro-Beijing newspaper said the film encouraged subversion. The University of Hong Kong urged its student union to cancel a showing of a film about a jailed activist.

The screening went on as planned. But a few months later, the university said it would stop collecting membership fees on the organizations behalf and would stop managing its finances as punishment for its radical acts.

Mainland China has long restricted the number of films made outside China that can be shown in local cinemas. But Hong Kong has operated much like any other movie market around the world, with cinema operators booking whatever might sell tickets.

The citys expanded censorship could therefore take a small but meaningful bite out of Hollywoods overseas box office returns.

Joker, the Warner Bros. supervillain film from 2019, was not cleared for release in mainland Chinese cinemas, for instance. But it collected more than $7 million in Hong Kong, according to the entertainment industry database IMDBpro.

China has become more important to Hollywood in recent years because it is one of the few countries where moviegoing is growing. Ticket sales in the United States and Canada, which make up the worlds No. 1 movie market, were flat between 2016 and 2019, at $11.4 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association. Over that period, ticket sales in China increased 41 percent, to $9.3 billion.

As a result, American studios have stepped up their efforts to work within Chinas censorship system.

Last year, PEN America, the free-speech advocacy group, excoriated Hollywood executives for voluntarily censoring films to placate China, with content, casting, plot, dialogue and settings tailored to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials. In some instances, PEN said, studios have been directly inviting Chinese government censors onto their film sets to advise them on how to avoid tripping the censors wires.

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

Read this article:
Chinas Censorship Widens to Hong Kongs Vaunted Film Industry, With Global Implications - The New York Times

Photo: Courtesy of Magnet

Britain in the 80s was grasped by the talons of Thatcherism: a brand of right-wing politics that upheld the individual and traditional family values. Some (many!) decried it as fascist, a call that became all the more emphatic when the Thatcher government took on Britains industrious towns and cities, closing down mines, mostly in the north and Wales, and destroying entire families livelihoods.

For Prano Bailey-Bond, the first-time director behind Sundance hit Censor, its difficult to separate Britains turbulent contemporaneous politics from the panic around video nasties: gore-heavy, straight-to-VHS B-movies around which the tabloids rustled up a profound moral hysteria, egged on by the state. In Britain at that time, you have job losses, you have welfare being cut. People were living in poverty, she says. So theres going to be more unrest, and I think horror was an easy scapegoat for all the bad in the world it took pressure off politicians, off what was actually going on.

This political reality serves as a tangible through-line in Censor, which follows a relatively simple conceit. Enid, a film censor played by Niamh Algar, is on the front line in Britains war against the nasties; she decides whether theyre fit for public consumption.All the while, shes tormented by the mysterious loss of her sister: Once inseparable, she vanished without a trace when they were young. But when she sits down to rate a particularly graphic film by the notorious gore-hound Frederick North, things begin to spiral, her perception of reality and fiction blurring at an exponential rate. The crescendo Censor eventually hits offers one of the more unsettling dnouements in recent horror cinema.

With Censor being released this week, Vulture chatted with Bailey-Bond about moral panic, why we love watching films that indulge in the most grotesque of body horror, and whether the video nasties, despite their reputation, can be appreciated as art.

Film censorship happens everywhere, but the moral hysteria around video nasties was specific to England in the 80s. Can you tell us a little about that history?

The birth of VHS led to a boom in low-budget horror becoming available. In every country, these films could go directly to the home, be watched and rewatched potentially getting into the hands of children. For various reasons, the U.K.s reaction was one of the most conservative in western countries. Its a moral panic that emerged in the Thatcher era, this idea that these films were going to possess those who watched them, make them throw their moral compass out of the window, and do terrible things: garrote each other with shoelaces, attack each other with axes.

In the Daily Mail, there was an article called Pony Maniac Strikes Again, which was about a bunch of ponies who were attacked. And the police statement in this article said that the attacker was probably influenced by either video nasties or the full moon. So suddenly the real world becomes this supernatural place where were all howling at the moon, and growing hairs, and going out to attack ponies. Its amazing how the tabloid press was about to whip up this moral panic around these films.

There are moments in Censor where you contrast the political violence of the Thatcher era in the background of one scene, theres archival news footage of police cracking down on a miners strike, for example with the grotesque, but otherwise benign, horrors of the video nasties. Why is that?

Its what I see when I look at that footage. Because obviously in the background of all of this were the miners protesting about the mines being closed down and everybody losing their livelihoods. And you see police brutality in the footage thats not being highlighted or looked at as perhaps not the right way to deal with things, when you look back. But some kind of gory, probably campy special effects are supposed to infect someones brain and make them go out and murder somebody.

We dont watch a horror film and then completely lose all of our morals. The reason people do terrible things is not that simple. It comes from somewhere much deeper; it can come from how weve been treated in life and how we feel in our heads. Its such a simple explanation to just blame horror.

It feels like theres a direct line between this moral panic, happening in a very specific political moment, and, say, the hysteria around video games in America over the past decade or so. The idea that games like Grand Theft Auto lead to shootings

Absolutely, and thats sort of why I wanted to set the film in the past, so that you have an objective viewpoint. When we were developing the film, a few people said, Why dont you make it about a contemporary censor? But the period and what was going on is just too rich not to set it then. But you also have distance from it. You can go back and go, Well, in the 50s, it was comic books that were going to turn little boys into horrible big men. And then it was video nasties. And then it was video games. Its been Marilyn Manson; its been rap music.

Specifically with the VHS thing, I found it interesting to think about just how fragile we think we are, or how fragile our moral compasses are as people, that this new piece of technology is going to completely destroy our understanding of right and wrong. Were so scared of technology; were so scared of the things we create and what theyre going to do back to us.

Sometimes the fear of what theyre going to do causes more of a problem than the technology itself. I think youve got that in the fears around social media and what thats going to do to us and how that is warping our perception of reality, which is perhaps warped already, because then we can go into, What even is reality? And we wont go down that road. Maybe were just a frightened species.

What is it with our attraction to the morbid, the grotesque, and gore what attracts us to, say, people being torn limb by limb by zombies, beheadings, and disembowelment?

I think about this a lot. Some people love it, and some people just cant stand it. I know from my perspective its not so much about the gore. Theres something very physical about watching these kinds of films. I think horror is the most similar, of all film genres, to a roller-coaster ride. You can feel the electricity sometimes when youre watching a horror film, and I dont think you get that from other genres. For me, Im really interested in trying to understand why people do bad things. Im really interested in dark minds and picking them apart.

Its a funny one: My sister isnt really into horror, but she loves crime dramas, and, actually, women are the audience for a lot of serial-killer films. Sometimes I think, Is it because we want to protect ourselves? I dont think anyone wants to genuinely put themselves in these horrific situations in real life, but because we know its fiction, theres something very cathartic about it its an adrenaline rush at times, too. I dont have a hard-and-fast answer.Im still trying to work it out.

Theres an early line of dialogue where a film producer hes supposed to be a bit of an asshole, I think shows some artistic appreciation for an eye-gouging scene that Enid wants to cut: Its King Lears Gloucester, he contests. Its Un Chien Andalou. Looking back, do you think the nasties can be framed, and appreciated, as art?

I think some of them can. The video nasties, as a whole, are quite varied in terms of their art. Some of them are only known or spoken about now because they were banned; had they not been banned, I dont think wed be watching them. Some of them were impressively bad.

But some of them I do think of as art: You look at something like [Dario Argentos] Suspiria or [Matt Cimbers] The Witch Who Came From the Sea they are pieces of art, in my opinion. They have a real kind of vision behind them. And theyre quite sophisticated filmmaking in their own way. Its a real range. Theres the really schlocky ones, and there are some really fun, wild ones like Basket Case. But even then, theres art in Basket Case, you know.

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Censor Director Prano Bailey-Bond Is Going to Shock You - Vulture

Two public sessions have been held via Zoom seeking input from the community on the removal of the Potter Hill Dam. The first meeting was on March 18 and the second on June 10. This dam removal effort will affect the residents of both Westerly and Hopkinton. Hopkinton was not made aware of this until March 18. There has been little notice of these public information sessions. These sessions have been online only via Zoom and public comments were limited by the Zoom moderator.

There was a website built after the first meeting to submit questions. These questions and comments are not publicly visible. My questions and others I have spoken with have had no replies after being submitted.

In the most recent public meeting on June 10 there were many people who had their hands raised on the Zoom meeting who were not called upon. For the limited few (including myself) who were called upon, we were not allowed to speak after our question was replied to.

This team has been working on this removal proposal for 10 years and has not fully explained the options reviewed and how decisions were made. There are several unanswered questions that the public should have answered by this team before any work to remove the dam commences in July. There needs to be a public meeting in person that allows the public to comment without censorship.

Jim Duksta

Ashaway

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Letter: Censorship on Potter Hill Dam removal | Letters to Editor | thewesterlysun.com - The Westerly Sun

We all know about the censorship by social media companies, but how this got started has never been explained.

Most people think that the Big Tech companies did this on their own because of their protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Well, I have had in my possession some documents for several months that came from the congressional office of U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, on his congressional stationery and signed by him.

These documents reveal that on April 29, Schiff sent a letter to the presidents on Google, YouTube and Facebook, suggesting that they could use their position to reduce or eliminate information on the internet that was contrary to the reports of the World Health Organization. It is reasonable to conclude that when Big Tech got the green light to censor people about COVID-19 that they saw the opportunity to use the same means to censor the president and so on.

I have provided the documents to various political and legal figures.

Everyone had assumed that social media was immune from prosecution because of Section 230. It is now clear that the Big Tech firms were acting as an agent for the federal government through its agent, Congressman Adam Schiff. As such, that eliminates the protections and makes them subject to a civil lawsuit.

This is the same legal principle as someone borrowing your car. If you loan your car to a third party for the benefit of the borrower, there is nothing wrong with that. But if you give this person the keys to your car so that he can pick up something for you, then he is acting as an agent for you and any negligence he commits is imputable to you, such as in the case of Congressman Schiff.

So when you get angry about the censorship of social media companies, remember who got all this started and vote the Democrats out of office and teach them a lesson.

Editors note: According to several news accounts, including CNBC, Congressman Schiff sent a letter to the CEOs of Google, YouTube and Twitter asking them to be more like Facebook about removing misinformation about COVID-19. Facebook was already directing its users to COVID myths debunked by the World Health Organization.

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Big Tech acting as Schiff's agent in its censorship - The Daily Advance

Niamh Algar in CensorImage: Magnet Releasing

Censor is a 2021 Giallo film written and directed by Prano-Bailey Bond, and co-written with Anthony Fletcher. The story follows Enid Baines (Niamh Algar), a woman who works at the British film censor board. She is part of a team that decides which movies make it into theaters and which films will never see the light of day. While at work shes well-liked and seen as a hard worker, but outside her job, shes haunted by her younger sisters disappearance.

Her parents want to move on, but Enid refuses to let go. Then, one day while looking at a gory slasher snuff film, Enid thinks she sees her sister in the movie. This sets her on a course of self-destruction as she aims to unravel the truth behind her sisters disappearance. Censorwhich io9 got to review out of Sundance earlier this yearcenters around the inner workings of Enids mind instead of focusing on the terrors of the real world. Bailey-Bond and Fletcher want to evoke unease and tension. However, it often gets overshadowed by its hesitancy to tell the audience the truth. Not sure why as early on its easy to predict where the story is going. Further exploring how obsession as a trauma response can lead to disastrous results would have been a better use of the movies time instead of trying to be scary.

Despite the issues, the Giallo influence is palpable and used to great effect. Censor expertly uses color and style to blend atmospheric tension and suspense. The Cinematography by Annika Summerson and Bailey-Pranos direction is Argentoesque and make it very obvious. The pinks, blues, and purples are not the usual colors used to create tension, but it works here. Theres a strong sense of claustrophobia. No matter where Enid is in the film, the super-tight shots leave no room for her to move, so the audience is forced into a state of discomfort watching this womans death spiral. The kill scenes are gory as hell and also tightly filmed, so you see everything up close and personalin all its bloody glory.

Is Censor the future of Giallo cinema? Well, its hard to say as Giallo is one of those timeless sub-genres that doesnt often see drastic changejust bigger budgets. A better question is whether modern directors and storytellers will utilize the style enough to enhance quality content? And that is what Censor does well. Read Germain Lussiers in-depth Sundance 2021 review of Censor here. The film is currently in theaters and will be available on VOD June 18.

For more, make sure youre following us on our Instagram @io9dotcom.

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Is Censor the Future of Giallo Horror? - Gizmodo