“It's very bad,” said Jane Bone, who worked for Jimmy Lai, the newspaper's owner. 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 are not showing this film to Hong Kong audiences.”
The show's director, Lulu Wang, said last week that she had not thought about it Expatriates To be political. But Amazon deliberately chose to enter this high-risk environment. Beijing's national security laws have made everything political, from carrying blank pieces of paper to singing songs deemed a threat to national security in schools.
Tony (left), a protester in the Umbrella Movement in the diaspora.credit: Amazon Prime
The threat of legal repercussions and self-censorship has hung over the production since its early days. Wang L said Los Angeles Times That the show considered changing the yellow umbrellas used in the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests to a less threatening shade of orange. To protect the crew, she said most of the protest scenes were filmed in Los Angeles.
“Art should be subversive, especially at this moment in time,” she said. “You have to say something.”
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That was last week. Now that it's out, Amazon seems happy to exploit the unrest in Hong Kong to drum up commercial interest in the show overseas while remaining tight-lipped about the reasons why it can't be shown to the people and place it depicts.
“A lot of Hong Kong people feel sad because the stories that happened in Hong Kong cannot be seen in Hong Kong,” Poon said.
“They are stationed overseas. They should say why Hong Kong’s national security laws affect them. They should give the public an answer.”
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