“It’s very bad,” said Jane Poon, who worked for Jimmy Lai, the owner of the newspaper Apple Daily before his newsroom was raided by 200 police for publishing seditious material critical of the Hong Kong government. “They should say publicly why they don’t show this film to Hong Kong audiences.”
The show’s director, Lulu Wang, said last week that she didn’t consider Expats to be political. But Amazon deliberately chose to enter into this high-stakes environment. The national security laws imposed by Beijing have made everything political, from holding blank pieces of paper to singing songs deemed to be a threat to national security in schools.
Tony [left], a protestor in the Umbrella Movement in Expats.Credit: Amazon Prime
The threat of legal repercussions and self-censorship hung over the production from its first days. Wang told the Los Angeles Times that the show considered changing the yellow umbrellas used in the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests into a less threatening shade of orange. To protect the cast, she said most of the protest scenes were shot in LA.
“Art has to be subversive, particularly at this moment in time,” she said. “You have to say something.”
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That was last week. Now it is out, Amazon appears happy to use Hong Kong’s turmoil to drive commercial interest in the show overseas while staying quiet on the reasons that it can’t be shown to the people and place it portrays.
“They are based overseas,” said Poon. “They should say why the Hong Kong national security laws affect them. They should give the public an answer.”
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