Ten Years

Watch for

• How each short changes visual and narrative strategy; the anthology’s discontinuity is part of its portrait of many different fears occupying the same city.
• Language itself as political material, especially the segment built around a Cantonese-speaking taxi driver confronting Mandarin requirements.
• The recurring concern with archives, memory and things disappearing—not only rights in the abstract, but material culture and everyday local habits.
• The shoestring production texture: modest locations, volunteer energy and limited spectacle keep the imagined future uncomfortably close to recognizable Hong Kong.

Production notes

Ten Years was conceived by Ng Ka-leung and produced on an extremely small budget with a largely volunteer cast and crew. Five young directors—Kwok Zune, Wong Fei-pang, Jevons Au, Kiwi Chow and Ng—were asked to imagine the territory a decade into the future. The segments range from political thriller to essay film and social drama, but together they turn issues already present in 2015 into speculative extrapolation. IFFR later programmed the film in its Made in Hong Kong retrospective and noted both the movie’s struggle for distribution and its 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards Best Film victory. Its local success was remarkable for an independent anthology with minimal marketing resources. The controversy that followed, including restrictions on mainland coverage of the awards, became inseparable from reception. Yet the production itself remains crucial: Ten Years demonstrates how small-scale filmmaking could become a public event when its fears aligned closely with the mood of its audience.

Trivia

• Ten Years is composed of five shorts directed by Kwok Zune, Wong Fei-pang, Jevons Au, Kiwi Chow and Ng Ka-leung.
• The film was produced on a shoestring budget with substantial volunteer participation.
• It became a surprise Hong Kong box-office success despite limited initial release.
• Ten Years won Best Film at the 35th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2016.
• The concept later expanded into separately produced Ten Years projects in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Myanmar, using the original Hong Kong film as a model for locally specific future anxieties.

Legacy

Ten Years has a different kind of canonical status from a formally perfected studio classic. Its historical force comes from the collision between production scale, public mood and political reaction. The film became a reference point for discussing Hong Kong identity during a period of accelerating uncertainty, and later events inevitably changed how audiences read its imagined 2025. That does not mean it should be ranked because it was 'prophetic'; such a claim would flatten both film and history. What endures is the decision to make the future a contested local space and to do so through independent filmmakers working outside prestige production. The anthology also prevents the post-handover section of the Top 100 from becoming only a continuation of established auteurs and commercial genres. It makes room for a film whose importance arose from civic circulation—people seeking it out, arguing about it and treating cinema as an arena where Hong Kong could imagine what it might become.