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This was published 7 months ago
Amazon self-censors Nicole Kidman’s new show in Hong Kong
By Eryk Bagshaw
So it has come to this. Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, has self-censored a TV series about a group of rich foreigners living in Hong Kong because of national security laws imposed on the city by Beijing.
Extraterritorial, wide-reaching and terrifying, China’s national security laws aimed to wipe out dissent in the democratic enclave in 2020 after months of protest over Beijing’s growing influence. They did. Now they have neutered Nicole Kidman and her group of gin-slinging friends in the Amazon series Expats.
Nicole Kidman owns the rights to Expats which is not available in Hong Kong. Credit:
The series premiered in all of Amazon’s markets around the world last week. That is everywhere except the city it is about. Amazon has not released an episode on its Hong Kong site. The company has declined multiple requests for comment. Hong Kong lawmaker Dominic Lee Tsz-king said on Monday the decision was made by the streaming platform and was unrelated to the government.
This is the pervasive impact of Hong Kong’s national security laws. They are so broad that a $777 billion company is self-censoring a show that is mostly about Kidman’s desperate search for her lost son. Hong Kong is just the setting for the six-and-a-half-hour epic, but that is enough to see one of the few major foreign productions about the city in recent years wiped from the screens.
At its best, the show offers a brief window into the protest movement, for 20 minutes, five long episodes in. This episode relies heavily on news reporting of the protests that rocked the city and grapples briefly with the torment of protesters and their families as their city transforms around them.
Kenny Ng, a film censorship expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, told NBC News in Hong Kong on Monday it was likely that Amazon had made the decision on its own as “a very safe gesture to pre-empt any future potential business risk”.
If the intention of self-censoring the show is to protect the cast and crew involved in this episode then that is understandable. Less so is Amazon and Kidman’s silence in doing so.
Kidman’s company, Blossom Films, owns the rights to the series based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 book The Expatriates.
“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 protester 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.”
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.
“Many Hong Kong people feel sad that the stories that happened in Hong Kong cannot be watched in Hong Kong,” said Poon.
“They are based overseas. They should say why the Hong Kong national security laws affect them. They should give the public an answer.”
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