Watch here the 10-minute movie “Jimmy Lai – Guilty of Innocence.” It will ask you whose side you are on: of the innocent victims or their brutal tormentors?
by Marco Respinti
Late Fall 2019, Hong Kong. For days, a huge and seemingly unstoppable crowd manifests against a new security bill introduced by the government of the former British colony to further the interests of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Police repress protesters with violence. Agents in war gear beat protesters with sticks and shoot rubber bullets. Around 8 am on November 11, 21-years old student Patrick Chow Pak-kwan is seriously wounded by a shot in his chest during demonstrations in Sai Wan Ho, the residential area on the northeastern shore of Hong Kong Island (he survived to be later sentenced to 6 years in prison). These are the introductory frames of the new 10-minute film, produced and directed by Mark A. Tarrant, “Jimmy Lai—Guilty of Innocence,” which premieres today in “Bitter Winter.”
Tarrant is a lawyer in Sydney, Australia, who grew up in Hong Kong. On December 18, 2023, the first day of Chinese fashion and media mogul Jimmy Lai’s farcical trial, he launched in the streets of Sydney an original protest: a neon light installation, soon to be known as “Neon Jimmy Lai,” produced by Melbourne artist Steven Cole.
Jimmy Lai—born Lai Chee-Ying, in Canton in 1947—always strongly supported freedom. He became involved with the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, where he had chosen to live, chiefly through the media outlet “Apple Daily” that he published. After several years of harassment, the police closed the journal and finally arrested Lai on August 10, 2020, with the ill-founded charge that he had violated the new security law. He was later arrested a second time, while already in prison, for having led a non-authorized protest march.
From Sydney streets, Tarrant’s and Coles’ “Neon Jimmy Lai” went on display in the Sydney Town Hall, professionally photographed by Amnesty International Australia’s Cam Durbin. The overall response from viewers and visitors was so rewarding that Tarrant decided to make Cole’s installation the subject of a 5-minute movie, “2023 Hong Kong Neon: Jimmy Lai in Chains,” which premiered in “Bitter Winter” on November 28, 2023. The new “Jimmy Lai—Guilty of Innocence” capitalizes on that success.
“Jimmy Lai—Guilty of Innocence” is indeed a very peculiar movie. Two thirds of its footage consist of the “Neon Jimmy Lai” installation in a store window in Sydney’s Newtown Street (where it was exhibited after the launching), as watched by casual passersby. But if one looks closer, it is the other way around: it is “Neon Jimmy Lai” who looks at the people. Lai stands still there, unable to move or speak—or laugh, cry, sing, shout. Hoarse, he stares behind the window of that shop as if behind the bars of the prison he lies in. There is calm in his eyes, not resignation. His flashing neon colors hit the eyes of the viewers, almost wound them. Jimmy Lai is now talking to passersby. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Are you standing for freedom and justice? Are you fighting for truth? Do you side with the tens, hundreds, thousands, millions innocent Jimmy Lai or with their brutal tormentors?”
The new Tarrant’s film interrogates us, pokes us, pushes us. The idea of a movie that repetitively insists on the same image, the “Neon Jimmy Lai,” interspersed only with another iconic picture of Lai himself behind the prison bars, is a stroke of genius.
The whole language of the movie is frank and direct. The introductory scenes of the 2019 protests are different from the usual platitudes of many film openings. They directly connect to the later picture of Lai in a prison cell above the words “Hong Kong,” to mean that now in Hong Kong all are Jimmy Lai and Jimmi Lai is all Hongkongers.
Pamela Leung, the Hong Kong artist who lives in Australia and cannot return home for fear of the CCP, speaks the same language. She appears right after the beginning of the film as showing her “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” rendering, written in tiny-dots blurred traditional Chinese characters as if it were fading. It is her way of depicting the CCP’s dehumanization of Hongkongers. Several of them are seen in the new movie. “By agreeing to appear unmasked in the film,” Tarrant told “Bitter Winter,” “they can no longer travel to Hong Kong—they are exiles. One lady who always appeared masked at the public neon displays decided, whilst we were filming in King Street, Sydney, to remove her black mask.”
In the film, Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong sings his cover of Vera Lynn’s (1917–2020) song “We’ll Meet Again.” It is a 1939 song, one of the most popular of the World War II era, when servicemen leaving for the front bid a farewell to their girlfriends that had no intention to be the last. Alas, for many of them it was. Through the decades, the song became a worldwide famous melancholic homage to all the unjustly displaced persons, who long for justice and family reunion—the many Jimmy Lais of our world. May all of them return home safe.
Because of all these features, “Jimmy Lai—Guilty of Innocence” has a high potential to go viral and become a pop icon. It has the right posture and uses the correct gestures. It is more than minimalist: it is essentialist, and this reaches right to the imagination and memory of the viewers. Its willingly meager and for that reason highly evocative script and scenography go right to the point—and stay there. People will remember Lai, the neon installation, his face behind the bars. They could forget the rest, they could even not know his case, but they will always be haunted by his eyes. And this is what a short movie like this is being filmed to do.
“Jimmy Lai—Guilty of Innocence” deserves in fact to be displayed publicly and continuously. There are cities in the world and public administrations that honor merit in many fields. Some give medals to war and peace heroes. Some openly stand for democracy and human dignity, challenging tyrants. These cities and public administrations should adopt Tarrant’s new movie and display it on screens used for commercials in public plazas, on animated billboards in airports and railway stations, at the underground stops and on other public transportation. Maybe a condensed version of it made especially for this use, with fast-forwarded time-lapses, will come in handy for these cases. Ideally, some brave TV networks and movie distribution companies should also screen Tarrant’s film, perhaps in pauses during shows and before major Hollywood productions in theaters.
We know the power of short movies. When they are well done, it is greater and more incisive than full-length films. Professionally done trailers are sometimes better than the full movies they announce, being a form of visual art in themselves or even containing self-sufficient micro-stories. One needs only to mention Disney’s 1928 “Steamboat Willie,” the third short film featuring Mickey Mouse but the first to be distributed. It impressed the imagination of all forever, with its simple plot and basic drawings, still catching the attention even in our sophisticated and bored times that have “already seen everything.” Or the 1932 “Flowers and Trees,” another Disney’s short in the series “Silly Symphonies,” whose plants fighting an intentional fire influenced generations of filmmakers and made it the first cartoon to receive an Academy Award.
The cause of Jimmy Lai, and of the multitude of Jimmy Lais, has to stick into the hearts and minds of all, today and tomorrow. The short film may be just what is needed.