A new television series starring Nicole Kidman and featuring scenes of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests debuted on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, but could not be accessed in the Chinese city where it was partly filmed.
“Expats” revolves around the lives of three American women — including a protagonist played by Kidman, who is also an executive producer — in the former British colony in 2014, according to Amazon.
Created by Chinese-born American filmmaker Lulu Wang based on a 2016 novel, its first two episodes were listed as “currently unavailable” for viewers based in Hong Kong.
According to early reviews of the show, its penultimate episode — set to be aired on February 16 — includes scenes recreating Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement: a 79-day occupation of main thoroughfares to oppose Beijing’s restrictive election rules.
Amazon’s website on Friday listed the show’s country availability as “worldwide”.
AFP has contacted Amazon for comment.
Hong Kong’s Commerce and Economic Development Bureau said the city’s film censorship laws do not apply to streaming services.
Five years after the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong saw fresh protests that were massive and at times violent, with demonstrators taking to the streets to call for greater freedoms.
Beijing clamped down on dissent in 2020 by imposing a national security law on Hong Kong, which critics say has affected the city’s artistic and cultural freedom, and tightened censorship.
In 2021, Hong Kong also passed censorship laws forbidding broadcasts that might breach the national security law.
Censors have since ordered directors to make cuts to their films and refused permission for others to be shown.
While those rules do not cover streaming services, authorities have warned that online platforms are still subject to the national security law, which criminalises the broadly defined crimes of subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.
Episodes from “The Simpsons” that satirised the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and forced labour in China were previously found to be missing from the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong.
“Expats” — partly filmed in Hong Kong in 2021 — sparked controversy then when Kidman was allowed to shoot scenes without having to follow Covid quarantine rules, which at the time were among the strictest in the world.
