A film festival in Taiwan, slated for next month, will kick off with a Hong Kong protest documentary that has yet to screen in commercial cinemas locally due to political controversy.
The Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) announced Tuesday that the 10-day event starting April 30 will open with “Inside the Red Brick Wall,” a film about the bloody siege at the Polytechnic University during the peak of the 2019 protests.
“Protesters were trapped in the large-scale conflict, a tragic scene that resembled a battlefield. The frontline documentarians closely recorded the protesters’ bloody struggle,” TIDF, one of the largest film festivals in Taiwan, wrote.
The biennial festival was originally meant to take place last May, but was postponed due to COVID-19.
Ying E Chi Cinema, the independent film company that produced “Inside the Red Brick Wall,” thanked the festival organizer for acknowledging the documentary.
“Inside the Red Brick Wall” is yet to debut on commercial theatres on Hong Kong. Last week, it was scheduled to screen at Golden Scene Cinema in Kennedy Town, but the show was scrapped just three hours ahead of time.
The cinema explained that the movie screening had led to the theatre receiving “excessive attention.” Tickets for the show, which were refunded to disappointed moviegoers, reportedly sold out minutes after booking opened online.
Last November, the Polytechnic University student union planned to screen the film to mark one year since the campus battle. The siege, which lasted almost two weeks, ended in the arrest of over 1,300 people with hundreds hospitalized.
But the university’s Student Affairs Office banned the screenings, stating that hosting the movie would put the school “at the risk of violating the laws of Hong Kong.”
