Review: We Have Boots

Chan's doc on the Umbrella Movement

It's hard rewatching footage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, police indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at protesters, roughly pushing them down on the ground, and the scenes of officers beating up commuters in Prince Edward MTR station are horrifying every time, as well as the white shirted men with sticks attacking people at the Yuen Long MTR station.

How did this all happen within a span of days, weeks and months?

But these scenes only make up a small part of director Evans Chan's documentary, We Have Boots: Hong Kong on the Edge (2020) that was shown online as part of the Global Hong Kong Studies at the University of California.

Yellow umbrellas became symbol of movement

His film actually focuses more on the 2014 Umbrella Movement, how it happened (spontaneously), thousands of people occupied parts of the city and ended without a proper resolution 79 days later as police arrested people and cleared the streets.

Chan demonstrates the consistency of the Hong Kong government to ignore the Basic Law, to ignore the will of the people and to reinforce Beijing's authority over the city. He focuses on a few pro-democracy activists, both young and old and how they each found their way to be part of this movement.

They include legal scholar Benny Tai Yiu-ting, former sociology professor Chan Kin-man, Agnes Chow Ting, Alex Chow Yong-kang, localist Ray Wong Toi-yeung and social worker Shiu Ka-chun.

It's interesting to hear Agnes Chow explain how she got politically involved through a Facebook page, and threw herself into the cause, while Tai and Chan rationalise the need to have this civil disobedience exercise in the streets. They look to Martin Luther King Jr for inspiration, and believe (naively or not) that people inherently have the right to protest on moral grounds and that they will persevere in the end.

Film interviews Tai (middle) and Chan (right)

Meanwhile the documentary notes that the localist movement grew out of the 2014 movement because they were not given a chance to speak to the crowds in Admiralty, to provide another opinion. The pro-democracy movement acknowledges this mistake which caused the movement to splinter into groups like Hong Kong Indigenous.

While Chan and Tai said they were mentally prepared for prison time by not using air conditioning as much as possible, for Shiu it was heartbreaking to see him with his mother and knowing she would be on her own for several months while her son was in jail. He was doing it for the greater good, but at the same time he was pained to know he would not be there to look after his mother.

However, the documentary feels like it's missing Joshua Wong Chi-fung -- who was considered a key part of the 2014 movement, and pushed onto the international stage by the global media. There is no interview with him at all to learn how he was dealing with being one of the ring leaders of the movement, and also the decisions they were making at the time.

Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai-Chee-ying is also missing in this film, who was literally at Admiralty everyday. He and his newspaper played a major role in helping to get the crowds out.

There is a lot of reflection from Alex Chow, who was a key member of the Occupy Movement and then he became a Buddhist in jail and went overseas to study, probably never to return. 

Chan puts events into context

Director Chan gives a lot of background to explain how the 2014 Umbrella Movement came to be, as more mainlanders flooded the city to buy goods, leaving locals overwhelmed and beginning to identify more strongly as Hongkongers and realising the government was not standing up for them, that they had to do it themselves.

However after the movement was shut down without any resolution, many people were depressed and despondent. So is it any surprise how they were determined to learn from their mistakes in 2014 and have a leaderless pro-democracy movement?

By this time people like Wong and Tai were in jail, the government thinking it had everything under control. Chinese officials in the Liaison Office were completely out of touch with what was going on too, as evidenced by the November 2019 District Council elections where pro-democracy candidates swept 17 out of 18 districts. 

We Have Boots gives a condensed taste of what happened with the government's bungling of the extradition bill and how young people were very creative in fighting back. Their fight became an existential one of literally fighting to keep Hong Kong's rights and freedoms -- a huge burden for the next generation. But they felt they had no choice.

It is believed Chan has plans to follow up We Have Boots with a closer examination of the 2019 protests and that would be good to have some analysis and more importantly a record of what happened. While it is re-traumatising to watch this footage over and over, we need to remember this happened and we saw it happen.

We Have Boots: Hong Kong on the Edge

Directed by Evans Chan

2hours, 9 minutes