Award-winning film “Ten Years,” which paints a bleak future of Hong Kong under increasingly authoritarian rule, will be removed from Netflix shelves at the end of the month.
While netizens were quick to attribute the takedown to political censorship, a director of one of the film’s shorts, Kiwi Chow, clarified that it is due to the movie’s contract with Netflix expiring.
The last day to watch “Ten Years” on Netflix is July 31, according to a note on the streaming platform.
A low-budget indie film released in Dec. 2015, “Ten Years” comprises five dystopian vignettes that imagine what Hong Kong would look like a decade down the road.
In one scene, a taxi driver is banned from picking up passengers because he is speaking Cantonese instead of Mandarin. In another, children dressed in military uniform are encouraged to rat on adults whose behavior are interpreted as acts of rebellion against the party, reminiscent of oppression during the Cultural Revolution in China.
Recent political developments since the passing of the national security law have come to mirror the film’s fictional, worst-case-scenario shorts, some say.
“Ten Years” was released on Netflix in Feb. 2019. It won the title of best film at the 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards, prompting state broadcasters to ban the ceremony from airing in mainland China.
Reader Interactions