Lost in the Fumes

Nora Lam’s riveting, sometimes unsettling portrait of radical activist Edward Leung has turned out to be eerily prophetic. Leung became famous in 2015 at the age of 25, when his political party, Hong Kong Indigenous, advocated Hong Kong independence, a position then rejected by most HKers. Disqualified by the government from campaigning in 2016, and charged with the serious crime of ‘rioting’, Leung is facing the possibility of becoming essentially a political prisoner (he is now in jail serving a six-year prison term).

Leung himself is charismatic and complicated. In a series of self-revelatory interviews, he opens up to Lam about his struggles with depression, which only abated when he discovered his political calling in 2014. Leung’s slogan ‘Reclaim Hong Kong; revolution of our time’ was considered too outside the mainstream back then. But the mainstream has shifted towards him, and in 2019 the slogan was widely adopted as the HK protest movement’s rallying cry.

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