With a running time of around one-third of the numerous feature docs that have attempted to make sense of the escalating #authoritarian developments plaguing #Hong Kong# in recent years, Anders Hammer’s searing short Do Not Split gets farther than most. Both precise and concise – and with breakneck-speed editing and tense techno beats that make the life and death stakes utterly visceral – the recent Oscar-shortlisted film is a deep dive inside the 2019 youth-led protests. The veteran Norwegian director weaves in and out, from the harrowing frontlines to behind the scenes, alongside the teens and twenty-somethings whose masked (often gas-masked) baby faces belie a collectively steadfast warrior spirit ready to sacrifice all for the democracy cause.
Ragtag youth
Do Not Split (its title a reference to standing together physically, and perhaps philosophically) begins with a brilliant opening sequence set in October 2019 where Hammer’s camera keeps pace with a ragtag band of youth struggling to simply locate the Bank of China. The madcap antics soon give way, however, to a swift and serious torching of said financial institution. Behind a roving lens that mirrors the asymmetrical warfare playing out on the city streets, Hammer soon becomes privy to a multitude of innovative tactics – not just the use of tear gas-shielding umbrellas (those ubiquitous images broadcast around the globe), but also to the less sensational, though equally utilitarian, such as the adoption of #Telegram to warn comrades as to where cops are stationed. He captures enraged, pro-China demonstrators as they face off against the pro-democracy camp, with taunts and screams of «Remove the mask!» (once the pandemic hit, this demand, in hindsight, would appear as wrongheaded as their conviction). To which a brave male activist responds, «I’m wearing a mask because I’m free to do it! And you are here because you have freedom in Hong Kong» (out of the mouths of babes).
Both precise and …the recent Oscar-shortlisted film is a deep dive inside the 2019 youth-led protests.
A scruffy hipster sporting a #Che Guevara# t-shirt seems uncannily chill while militarized police lay siege to his university. He even narrates events with a preternatural calm as firebombs explode in the near distance. A female leader appears similarly resigned to her fate, explaining that she’s now set aside any plans for a teaching career – her political #activism having rendered her persona non grata in civil society. And still, she is «more determined to be sacrificing,» as she bluntly states.
Basic freedoms
At one point a male freedom fighter simply laments, «the British handed us over to #China like a bag of potatoes.» The words should serve as a sharp slap in the face to those of us in smug western societies rooting for this generation of change-makers now facing life imprisonment a world away. It’s one thing to cheer on a righteous cause playing out on our computer screens, to cry foul at a slide into dictatorship as we pat ourselves on our strong «enlightened» backs. It’s quite another to admit your complicity in this ongoing proto-authoritarian nightmare. For lest we forget, Hong Kong – like the vast majority of nations that continue to battle for basic freedom every waking day – was never, of course, really free. Nor are existential crises ever conjured up in a vacuum. And they certainly cannot be solved solely by heroic, social media-savvy high schoolers and college kids burdened with a debt they never should have had to pay.
