Ten Years: has the hit film’s dystopian vision of Hong Kong in 2025 become a reality?

In 2015, a scrappy group of film-makers tapped into the ‘anxiety of what the city would become’ under Beijing’s increasing influence. Now screening at the Hong Kong film festival UK, it resonates in new ways

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taxi driver struggles to keep working as his native language of Cantonese is sidelined for Mandarin. Petty gangsters do the work of the authorities amid a violent debate about a national security law. Supporters of Hong Kong independence are jailed.

In 2015, a scrappy group of Hong Kong film-makers imagined what their semi-autonomous city could look like under the increasing influence of the Chinese Communist party (CCP).

“Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental,” reads the first scene in the opening credits. But decade on, many of the predictions made in Ten Years have, in some form, come to pass.