VILenin

In Hong Kong, where dissent is now characterised by silence, few dare openly criticise the government or the Chinese Communist party (CCP) that controls it. Film-maker Kiwi Chow is one of the few.

”The Chinese Communist party’s practice is to try and destroy history and truth,” the 46-year-old director says from his home in the region. “It’s ridiculous that I can still live in Hong Kong without being in jail.”

In a society where someone can be jailed for wearing a “seditious” T-shirt, his surprise is understandable.

Chow is best known for co-directing the 2015 dystopian anthology film Ten Years, which imagined a future Hong Kong under the increasing influence of the CCP, and for Revolution of Our Times, his award-winning 2021 documentary about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.

His latest film, Deadline, is about high school students haunted by threats of suicide in an environment of intense academic pressure. Chow says this has long been a problem in Hong Kong, but has been made worse by the region’s new national security regime.

Chow can still live in Hong Kong, and many of his films have been successful there, but his outspoken political views and works are making life increasingly difficult for him.

On 12 December, Hong Kong’s film censorship authority refused to grant approval for Deadline to be released, citing national security concerns. In a statement released after the refusal, Chow said that he would not appeal the decision, because doing so would be “futile”.

He added: “This film is the hard work and dedication from so many people – the investors, the actors, and the crew. It is heartbreaking to all of us. When confronted with injustice and absurdity, we feel helpless, and anger seems to be inevitable … In response to this the unfair judgement, my reaction is: I will stick to my filming path.”

Shelly Kraicer, an independent cinema curator specialising in Chinese film, says it is striking that Chow “doesn’t shy away from addressing quite directly the political constraints that he perceives he’s under”.

Much of Chow’s work deals with the upheavals that have shaped his home region. Most recently, the aftermath of the Wang Fuk Court fire, which killed at least 160 people in November, has brought further state pressure on dissent.

Less than a fortnight after the blaze, Hong Kong held “patriots only” legislative council elections, with only candidates vetted by the government allowed to stand. With Hongkongers reeling from the tragedy, and questions swirling about government accountability, the only way to safely voice dissent was by not voting. Turnout was at a near-record low of 31.9%.

Chow was one of the people who did not vote, but he has also been vocally critical of the government’s handling of the disaster.

“With collusion between officials and businesses, shoddy workmanship, lax oversight, rampant corruption and an unbalanced system, Hong Kong could not uphold professional standards,” he has said. “How long must Hong Kong endure this?”

The construction company that was doing renovation work on the compound at the time of the fire has not commented publicly on the tragedy. The consultancy in charge of the renovations reportedly closed down in the weeks after the fire. Directors from both of the firms have been arrested.

A Hong Kong government spokesperson said authorities were “going all out” to investigate the cause of the fire, and that several people had already been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.

The fire was the biggest test of Beijing’s grip on Hong Kong since the 2019-20 pro-democracy protests, which were ultimately quelled by the imposition of a fierce national security law. The first sign that Chow was not going to be silenced by this came in 2021, when he released Revolution of Our Times, a two-and-a-half-hour documentary filmed from the frontlines of the protests.

The film, which premiered at the Cannes film festival, took its name from the banned protest slogan: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time”.

Now Chow’s latest film, which stars the legendary Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong, has in effect been banned from public screening.

In theory, Deadline, which was filmed in Taiwan and partly funded by the government there, isn’t as politically sensitive as his earlier works. Set in an unnamed Asian city, it tells the story of an elite private school where students buckle under the heat of intense academic competition. It was released in Taiwan on 7 November.

But Chow believes the authorities are trying to make an example of him personally by refusing to grant approval for the film. “They don’t want to arrest me, but they want to destroy my creative career,” he said.

Hong Kong’s Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration said it would not comment on the approval process for individual films.

Kraicer said Hong Kong authorities “seem to be more interested in controlling what kinds of films get shown there rather than controlling the film-makers themselves”.

Deadline deals with themes that are common across east Asia. But Chow believes the pressure on teachers and students is even more intense in Hong Kong, where national security is now part of the curriculum.

“What happens when history, society and truth need to be distorted in school?. Teachers can’t talk about it, students can’t talk about it. They feel that despite what’s happening in society, the truth is distorted.”

He adds that in the course of his research for Deadline, he spoke to a physical education teacher who was struggling with how to incorporate national security elements into his sports lessons.

The official response to the Wang Fuk Court fire reflects Hong Kong’s new national security-focused era. Several people were arrested for alleged national security offences in the days after the blaze, including a student who started an online petition calling for government accountability.

On 15 December, a court in Hong Kong found the pro-democracy activist and publisher Jimmy Lai guilty on national security offences, in the most high profile case the city has seen since the imposition of the law in 2020.

But Chow remains undaunted. He thinks the authorities are unlikely to arrest him, lest they bring more attention to his films. He concedes it could still happen, though. He’s discussed the possibility with his wife and says he would rather use his freedom to speak out while he can.

“Even if we left Hong Kong, the fear would linger,” he says, referring to Beijing’s increasing practices of targeting critics overseas. Instead, he says, “I want to stay in Hong Kong and get used to living with fear.”

FREMONT — A long-simmering battle over public access to a regional park here has reached a literal roadblock.

For years, rancher Christopher George fought with county, city and parks district officials for control of a section of Morrison Canyon Road, a rural route to his property and to Vargas Plateau Regional Park. The war of words over 1,000 feet of the roadway spiraled into lawsuit and allegations of county corruption.

At long last, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors last month voted to hand responsibility of the 0.2-mile stretch over to George, and within weeks the rancher erected a gate. Just as quickly, an old foe — the city of Fremont — has re-emerged to demand the barrier be torn down, arguing the roadway has been part of the city’s jurisdiction since it incorporated in 1956.

In a letter to George’s attorney dated Nov. 6, City Attorney Rafael Alvarado Jr. wrote that the rancher has “illegally constructed an unpermitted gate” across the roadway and that he has “no legal authority” that would allow “a private party to construct a gate over public land.”

“For the past 70 years, the public has used and enjoyed the roadway as a public right of way, and said public use of the roadway has been open, notorious, continuous and adverse to any purported private interest of your client,” Alvarado wrote. George, who is also the CEO of CMG Financial, a mortgage company, did not respond to requests for comment.

The unlikely battleground has been the center of controversy for nearly two decades. In 2008, George and a neighbor filed a lawsuit over traffic and roadway conditions, leading to a settlement in 2012 that delayed the opening of Vargas Plateau Regional Park while East Bay Regional Park District and the city of Fremont spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve the road and reduce the number of parking spaces at the park.

While the 1,249-acre public park has other access points for hikers, bikers and horseback riders, it has only one staging area with a parking lot, restrooms and drinking water — which is accessible solely via Morrison Canyon Road.

Map showing the location of 1,000 feet of roadway of which ownership between a regional park in Fremont and a rancher has been in dispute.After settling the suit, George proposed that officials cede ownership of the last 1,000 feet of the road leading to his hundreds-plus acre property. George has claimed that people have used the remote strip of road as a location for sex, drug deals and illegal dumping. Speaking before county supervisors on Oct. 9, he said his family’s safety is at risk and urged the board to approve ceding the land over to him.

“This provides a buffer for us of safety. My wife is at home frequently by herself, either during the day or sometimes at night, and as a result this provides safety for her, but also provides safety for the community,” George told the board. “You have cars trying to turn around, you’ve got bicycle riders trying to turn around, you’ve got pedestrians trying to turn around, you’ve got people pushing baby strollers trying to turn around. It’s just unsafe.”

County Public Works Director Daniel Woldesenbet, in comments to the supervisors, said he considers the land the George family’s “private driveway.”

“It really functions as a driveway, even though it was maintained and looked after by the county,” Woldesenbet said. He also said that the county spent over $200,000 on road maintenance over the past five years, adding that the road is in “very poor repair,” due to “eroded shoulders and sharp drops.”

“It’s very much apparent, at least from a public works point of view, that this roadway right now, as it stands, really serves as a private property,” Woldesenbet said. “We don’t think it’s warranted to continue to spend public funds maintaining that small piece of property or piece of road. And we also consider it to be potentially a hazard because there’s a lot of unsafe conditions on the side of the road for public use.”

The supervisors voted unanimously to surrender the land to George, with Supervisor Nate Miley calling the decision a “no-brainer” and Supervisor David Haubert saying it was “justified” and “warranted.”

Haubert’s office had previously faced blowback for an email his chief of staff sent advocating for “abandoning the right of way” and for accepting a $10,000 campaign donation from George’s mortgage company. At the time, the aide told this news organization he was simply passing along a request from a constituent and was shocked that it had raised any allegation of ill intent.

Jason Bezis, an attorney who represents a group of residents advocating against George’s claim to the roadway, called the rancher a “wily operator.” He said installing the gate was “brazen.”

“The law is very clear on this,” Bezis said Wednesday. “You’re not allowed to decide you’re going to put up a gate and a fence across a public road.”

“Why not leave it alone so people can use it?” added Kelly Abreu, a Fremont resident and advocate with Mission Peak Conservancy. “When we lose public spaces, then we end up having to buy the same amenities. This is not an amenity, really it’s a public asset.”

Others told the supervisors they were ignoring the fact that people regularly use the road.

“Why would the county give away this land when it’s part of the public road that many of us use and enjoy daily?” resident Daphne Lin said. “It seems like this is all made up stuff in order to give away public land just to benefit one particular property owner.”

Alvarado, the Fremont city attorney, warned in his letter that the city would monitor George’s property until the gate was gone. As of Wednesday evening, it was still there.

On Feb. 24, 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine and Moscow turned overnight into a pariah city, Emmanuel Carrère, one of France’s most acclaimed nonfiction writers, boarded a plane bound for the Russian capital.

Pariah city? According to who? Oh, I know, :international-community-1::international-community-2:

His agent had warned him: You don’t fly to a country on the day it invades its neighbor. But Mr. Carrère had a professional commitment there and, more important, he needed to grasp what had become of the country he had long loved, and which had inspired some of his best sellers.

Mr. Carrère spent 10 days in Moscow, long enough to watch a world collapse around him. New laws punished anyone who dared call the war a war, and his friends scrambled to flee.

Perhaps most disquieting for a man whose passion for Russia once had led him to spend weeks in a backwater 440 miles east of Moscow — an experience he recounted in “My Life as a Russian Novel” — was realizing how many Russians either backed the war or simply looked away.

“Something inside me was shattered, and still is, and my love for Russia has taken a serious blow,” Mr. Carrère said in a recent interview in his Paris loft, its all-white walls lined with rows of books. He noted that all that had once drawn him to Russia — its rich literature, tragic history and larger-than-life personalities — now seemed to have culminated in a brutal war.

“There’s a kind of dizzying depreciation of Russian values,” he said.

This reckoning pulses through his latest book, “Kolkhoze,” released in France in August and slated for U.S. publication next year. A best seller in France and one of four finalists for this year’s Goncourt Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary honor, it is a kind of autobiography that explores Mr. Carrère’s Russian roots and his relationship with his mother, who during her lifetime was France’s leading historian of Russia.

The new book helps readers understand his self-professed “deep love” for Russia before the war caused him to question that affection and the forces that shaped it.

In search of answers, Mr. Carrère traveled to wartime Ukraine to hear from those resisting Moscow, and visited the Caucasus nation of Georgia, which Russia invaded in 2008. Despite having a Georgian grandfather and a cousin who until recently served as the country’s president, he had never visited Georgia before. His love for Russia had always taken precedence.

His introspective writing about Russia also has held up a mirror to many others in France, beginning with his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. Her complacency toward the Kremlin, which Mr. Carrère critiques sharply in the book, shows a distinctly French fascination with Russia, shaped by a shared history of revolution, empire and cultural masterpieces.

“If we’re so interested in his story, it’s because it reflects back on ourselves,” said Léna Mauger, the editor of the French magazine Kometa, which published several of Mr. Carrère’s reports from Ukraine and Georgia that fed into his latest book.

Mr. Carrère, 67, began his career as a novelist, but he has devoted the past 25 years to mastering the nonfiction genre.

His subjects include a man who deceived his family for 18 years before killing them all, his embrace of meditation and the trial of those responsible for the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Yet Russia has been a constant in his work, the focus of two books and numerous magazine articles, because, as he writes in the opening pages of his latest book, “Russia, for better or for worse, is a family affair.”

His mother, raised by a Russian-Prussian aristocrat mother and a Georgian immigrant father who spoke Russian to her, was a prolific historian of Russia and a fixture on television debates about the Kremlin. She passed that passion on to her son, taking him on a research trip to Moscow and handing him to read, at just 13, “The Idiot,” Dostoyevsky’s 650-page dive into the Russian soul.

That education gave Mr. Carrère “a feeling that there’s a life that’s more intense” in Russia, he said.

He began traveling there regularly in the late 2000s, and, drawn by quixotic characters, wrote about a World War II Hungarian soldier who was captured by Soviet forces and discovered a half-century later in a remote Russian mental hospital. Then, in 2011, he turned his sights to Eduard Limonov, a Russian writer turned Soviet dissident turned ultraright-wing politician.

By then, Vladimir V. Putin was consolidating his autocratic rule and crafting his imperialist ambitions, lashing out at NATO’s expansion in 2007 and snatching up a fifth of Georgia’s territory the following year. Mr. Carrère, like so many others, paid little attention, seeing in Mr. Putin a “mafioso” who could still be reasoned with.

His mother, who died in 2023, was particularly blind, he writes in “Kolkhoze”: “Her love for Russia is real, visceral. The tragedy is that it morphed into indulgence for Putin, and for the past 20 years she continuously carried the Kremlin’s message” to successive French presidents, telling them that “Russia is a great country that cannot be judged by our standards and that Putin is a man of peace — provided he is not humiliated, of course.”

As opposed to the average westerner who has a completely objective and reasonable outlook

“Looking back, one realizes we should have understood much sooner,” Mr. Carrère writes.

But he didn’t, not until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

FULL-SCALE. FULL-SCALE. DID YOU HEAR THAT? FULL. SCALE. INVASION.

On the day it began, Mr. Carrère was set to fly to Moscow to participate in the making of a film adaptation of his Limonov biography, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian filmmaker who later fled Kremlin repression. After some hesitation, curiosity won out: he boarded the plane.

In Moscow, he saw “this Russia at war take shape,” he said, as belligerent rhetoric drowned out everything else and Kremlin propaganda “was calmly absorbed by quite a number of people.”

As opposed to the calm and reasonable westerners who have never ever cheered on brutal wars of conquest or anything and are completely unaffected by propaganda

To try to make sense of it all, Mr. Carrère set out to look at Russia through the experiences of those under its fire. Mr. Carrère first traveled to Georgia, where he caught up with his cousin Salomé Zourabichvili, the country’s former president, who had opposed its gradual takeover by pro-Russian forces.

Protocols of the Elders of Moscow

Georgia is where he began seeing Russia through the prism of colonialism, as a country that had long dominated its smaller neighbors, first through empire, then the Soviet Union. Now it was seeking to reclaim that domination.

Colonialism is when you have a central government

“War made me realize it,” he said. “I honestly don’t think I would ever have thought of Georgia as a colonized country before.”

He then visited Ukraine, joining the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko on trips to the frontline cities of Kherson and Kharkiv in late 2023. Along the way, they held long conversations about Ukraine’s efforts to purge the country of Russian culture and break free from Moscow’s influence.

Published in the NYT in 2025 or Der Sturmer in 1942? Hard to say.

The experience unsettled Mr. Carrère. Yet it helped him “see things through the eyes” of Ukrainians, he said, and grasp why Dostoyevsky, with his anti-Western, nationalist bent, is reviled there. Still, he hopes that when the war ends, the reckoning will be more measured.

Mr. Yermolenko said the trip was important to show Mr. Carrère “what the Russian world actually means, what it really brings” behind the “facade of Russian culture.”

I wonder if Mr. Yermolenko actually managed to keep himself from saying "Judeo-Bolshevism" or if the NYT had to excise that from the interview

He took Mr. Carrère to Kherson, so he could see streets emptied by relentless shelling, and to Kharkiv, where he spent an evening in an underground basement, sheltering from Russian attacks, at an event where people shared their poetry.

Did these experiences make him rethink his earlier writings on Russia? He hesitated. Had he known then what he does now, he said, he might have written a different portrait of Mr. Limonov, who grew up in Kharkiv under the Soviet Union yet scorned Ukraine as a nation.

“It’s a story of deconstruction,” Ms. Mauger, the magazine editor, said of Mr. Carrère. “He was shaped by something, and now he’s deconstructing it.”

Since 2022, Mr. Carrère has traveled four times to Georgia and as many to Ukraine. Will he keep writing about Russia? He’s not sure. He said he wanted to find other roots.

“Because a void has opened up,” he wrote in Kometa in late 2023. “Because I loved Russia and, however shocking it may be to say this about an entire people, one can still love some Russians, but one can no longer love Russia.”

After a day of hunting for a suspect in the assassination, investigators pleaded for help from the public.

The gunman who fatally shot the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained on the run Thursday as a frantic and fruitless hunt for the killer led law enforcement officers to scour through chicken coops and plead for the public’s help.

With no suspect identified, investigators shared blurry photographs of a person of interest, which showed a man in a stairwell shortly before the shooting, wearing a hat and sunglasses. Officers also scrutinized a bolt-action rifle that they believe was used in the attack and sought to identify the gunman with other video from security cameras on campus.

“We are confident in our abilities to track that individual,” Beau Mason, the commissioner of Utah’s Department of Public Safety, said on Thursday.

But more than a day after the killer fired from a rooftop vantage point, jumped from the building and disappeared into a neighborhood nearby, investigators struggled to piece together a clear picture of who the gunman was and where their quarry had gone. The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, were traveling to Utah to more directly oversee the manhunt.

Much of the early phase of the investigation had focused on a normally quiet residential street directly up a hill from Utah Valley University. Residents there said they had endured many hours of police searches and frantic law enforcement activity on Wednesday evening as heavily armed officers zeroed in on the area.

Local and federal officers, including agents from Homeland Security Investigations and the F.B.I., roamed the streets, knocking on doors and asking residents for footage from their doorbell cameras. As night fell, they combed a wooded area at the edge of some residents’ backyards with flashlights, an area where some in the neighborhood thought the officers recovered what was believed to be the shooter’s gun.

“It was kind of intense, very unsettling,” said Robin Harris, 41, who said police officers came to her door six separate times. At one point, she was startled by someone moving around her backyard, before realizing it was a police officer. Much of the early police activity centered around a house owned by the university that is under construction, with local residents seeing officers and dogs searching the property. Dylan Hope, 26, one of the construction workers at the house, said his crew was busy working on Wednesday afternoon when they heard a loud crack come from campus. Minutes later, Mr. Hope said, an excavator operator working on the site encountered a young man who said there had been a shooting. The interaction came almost immediately after the shooting, before any police officers arrived, Mr. Hope said. “He said somebody had been shot, and he was just trying to get home safe,” Mr. Hope said. “He seemed calm and stuff. He was shocked that someone had been shot.” About an hour after the shooting, Mr. Hope said that law enforcement officers arrived and showed the construction workers a photo of a man that they thought matched the description of the person the excavator operator had seen. Mr. Hope said the photo the officers showed the crew on Wednesday did not seem to look like the one the F.B.I. released to the public on Thursday.

Emergency radio traffic in the minutes after the shooting suggested a chaotic search for leads. There was talk among officers of various people who might be connected: a man dressed in a suit, a person who seemed to be going to hospitals looking for Mr. Kirk, someone who had removed an anti-Kirk post online, someone with a bionic arm.

At least two people were detained: A bespectacled man was dragged by police officers into a vehicle just minutes after Mr. Kirk was shot. Hours later, another man was taken into custody by investigators, a development celebrated by Mr. Patel on social media.

But in both instances, investigators found, the men had no connection to the shooting. The first one was a local political gadfly who was charged with obstruction of justice.

The other was a fan of Mr. Kirk’s who had attended the rally with friends. His name had been raised in emergency radio chatter and soon spread through social media. Family members said the man had gone home after the event, shaken and saddened by what had transpired, only to have investigators show up at his door to bring him in for questioning.

The man was able to show investigators video of the event that appeared to depict him standing in the crowd with his arms crossed as the gunshot rang out, the family members said. Investigators said they concluded that he was not involved. The fact that the shooting occurred at an outdoor event, attended by thousands of people, made nailing down and containing a perpetrator difficult from the beginning.

The event had been staffed by six police officers and Mr. Kirk’s own security team, according to the university police chief, Jeff Long. But investigators believe the gunman fired from the top of a building hundreds of feet away.

After the initial search through the neighborhood, investigators spent the overnight hours scouring through campus surveillance video, locating the images that they released on Thursday.

Investigators said they had also collected a footwear impression, a palm imprint and forearm imprints for analysis. They were reviewing some 200 tips.

The rifle that was recovered, a .30-06 Mauser, was located in a “wooded area where the shooter had fled,” Mr. Mason said. Investigators also recovered several cartridges, including a spent round in the rifle’s chambers, and sent them to be examined by analysts.

The search the previous day had proved unnerving for many residents.

Esther Whitney, 48, said she had been driving home from a Walmart when she learned there had been a shooting not far from her house.

“By the time I got home, there were already police, snipers across the street looking around for people, helicopters, lots of sirens and drones,” she said. At one point, Ms. Whitney realized the door of her chicken coop was hanging open.

“I actually went down with a baseball bat, cause I was like, ‘What if it’s the guy, and he’s hiding in there?’” she said. Then she realized it had been law enforcement officers searching through possible hiding places.

By Thursday afternoon, the activity had calmed significantly, but police cars were still watching the area, and yellow crime tape cordoned off a nearby stretch of street next to the campus. And homeland security officials were still knocking on doors.

Residents, meanwhile, were continuing to check in on each other. Ms. Whitney said she was making sure everyone was accounted for as part of her responsibilities as block captain.

“It’s kind of surreal that something this big happened in our backyard,” she said.