WASHINGTON — The Maclean’s Watch desk is putting a Hong Kong film on the reel. On 21 August it will screen The Hongkonger, Ron Holwerda’s 2022 portrait of Jimmy Lai. The picture plays on this site, in the Watch centre, as a special screening — not as a teaser and not as a hand-off to someone else’s player.
The Hongkonger, listed in some catalogues as The Hong Konger, is Holwerda’s 73-minute account of Lai’s choice when Apple Daily and its publisher were put in the same frame. The Acton Institute backed the picture. Lai is still in a Hong Kong cell. The film is the short file a Canadian reader can sit with in one sitting.
A bureau in Washington does not cover Hong Kong as a hobby. Ottawa still writes the China brief as if the only Asian capital that matters is the one with a navy. Lai’s paper was a newspaper. The charge against him is that he kept publishing. The film is that choice, not a sermon.
