Review of Hong Kong’s Fight for Freedom (2022)
Seen in 2023.
Protests against the encroachment of PRC authority over Hong Kong in 2019–2020.
A nuanced and well-structured portrait.
It’s a media-historical curiosity that the version I saw emphasized in captions how protesters interviewed on camera had their real faces concealed with deepfake technology. The term “deepfake” isn’t used; instead the SVT adaptation on Dokument utifrån states dubiously that the identity of the interviewees is protected “with the help of artificial intelligence” (med hjälp av artificiell intelligens). That feels more like a misguided marketing ploy than an improvement over the severe blurring of faces and voices in documentaries a decade earlier, but being able to see a face, even if is a little bit blurry and belongs to a different person, does help make a human connection.