Norwegian director Anders Hammer doesn’t yet know precisely how he will spend Oscar night or, indeed, whether he’ll be in black tie. “They’re working on digital solutions as to how to bring us into the show but it is not clear yet how it will be…I am waiting for further notice,” he says. However, he reassures readers that he won’t be wearing the hoodie that he is dressed in during his interview with BDE.
Hammer’s documentary short Do Not Split, a torrid, gut-wrenching account of the pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and early 2020, is in the running for an Academy Award.
Generally, an Oscar nod for a short doc doesn’t make global news. However, thanks to the ever more fraught relations between the protesters and the mainland Chinese authorities, the nomination has already provoked a mini-earthquake. When the nomination was announced, the western media soon began to report that China was going to “ban the Oscars” as a result.
“I did not expect to get nominated for an Oscar when I started working on this project so I was very happy for the recognition,” the director says. He quickly adds that everyone involved expected that “there would be a reaction from Beijing” to the nomination. After all, the protests chronicled in the documentary were directed against the Chinese leadership.
“It was no surprise they [the Chinese] reacted but I hadn’t been guessing what they would actually do. The strange thing is that we haven’t been told by anyone in Beijing about any decision [to ban the Oscars]. The only information we have about it is from media reports,” Hammer says of the ongoing confusion about the Chinese response to Do Not Split.
Hammer began working on the documentary with one simple aim: to capture the protests in as raw and close-up a way as possible. He wanted to “show what was going on from the ground level.” He spent many months filming, and talks of the intensity, youthful idealism and even humour of the protests.
When the Covid pandemic hit, the protesters were ahead of the local government in taking their own precautions. Inevitably, the intense mass gatherings had to be curtailed. “Like everyone else, I didn’t realise how serious and long this would be but I was very sure that quite early the pandemic would have a great effect on the protests and I wanted to include it in the movie,” Hammer reflects.
During 2020, as Covid took hold, the filmmaker and the protesters were still waiting to see how Beijing would respond to the unrest. Eventually, they got their answer. In the summer, the draconian National Security Law was introduced. It was like a fist in the face.
“There have been really dark times in Hong Kong this year. We have had mass arrests,” Hammer notes of the grim legacy of the new law. Two of the local politicians featured in the documentary were among the 55 people detained in early January. The arrests have continued since then.
Early during the shooting of the documentary, Hammer had tried to engage with the local police in order to understand how they could act so fiercely against fellow citizens.
“They rejected formal interviews,” the director notes. “There was no way I could follow a policeman or policewoman in the way I followed the protesters.” Even so, in the early days, he could get close to the cops with his camera. Sometimes, he could even stand behind them and film from their perspective. However, relations soon deteriorated. The police became less and less happy with the media. Hammer saw one instance of a reporter being shot with a rubber bullet. “He (the reporter) got really scared. He panicked. He thought it was live ammunition because it was so painful.” By the end of the protests, the police had become openly aggressive to the media. That meant Hammer’s attempts to understand their point of view were stymied.
Nor was the documentary maker able to get close to the pro-Beijing groups in Hong Kong. They were so bitterly opposed to the protests that they wouldn’t let the media near them. That is why so much of the film is shot from the perspective of the pro-democracy movement.
Ask Hammer if he draws a distinction between reportage and documentary or if he thinks about aesthetics when he is shooting his footage in the heat of street battles and he replies “that is for others to define.”
However, Field Of Vision, the documentary unit for which Hammer made the film, always looks to combine journalistic and traditional documentary techniques. The director, whose background was as a news reporter in Afghanistan, moved into documentary primarily because he felt it gave him “more ways to tell stories” and a chance to “awake emotions” in audiences.
The film is available online and has been widely watched in Hong Kong. However, for obvious reasons, it has struggled to gain much attention in mainland China.
Hammer himself is now back in Oslo, working on an investigative TV documentary. No, he is not allowed to discuss its subject. He hasn’t been able to return Hong Kong during the pandemic.
The story of the HK protests isn’t one with anything approaching a happy ending. Hammer speaks of the “frustrations of the protesters that the world did not care more or was too afraid to take more actions because they know they will be sanctioned by Beijing.”
Several of the protesters featured in the documentary have now left Hong Kong and are living in exile.
“I would love to go back to Hong Kong. I don’t know it will be possible but I know that I will continue to follow the developments in Hong Kong and continue to work on a documentary project about what has happened also after our movie ends,” Hammer says, hinting at a sequel. He doesn’t know, though, what form such a project will take. In the meantime, old democratic rights which used to be taken for granted by Hong Kong citizens before the summer of 2019 have continued to be eroded.
“I am not sure if the world realises how much Hong Kong is changing right now. With the documentary, we are hoping that we can bring attention to this critical situation,” Hammer observes. “Through the censorship that we see of the Oscars, that also implicates our movie, our documentary has also become part of this study about how freedom of expression and freedom of the press and other basic democratic rights are disappearing.”
