’s 2017 “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower” offered a fairly exhilarating view of youth activism, as it charted one Hong Kong student’s spearheading public opposition to mainland China’s increasingly heavy-handed takeover. The can-do optimism that documentary left viewers with is on life support in the director’s follow-up, which shifts nominal focus to one of Joshua Wong’s fellow protest leaders.
The documentary’s first third basically retraces the earlier film’s events, in which resistance atypical for this culture spiraled into massive marches involving one, then two million participants. For a while, it seemed the “Umbrella Movement” might really make the mainland monolith reconsider its course.
Considered by some “the brains” of the youth movement, Law ran for a Legislative Council seat at age 23. Though his campaign was scoffed at, he won, becoming the youngest such winner ever. But the hopes that pro-democracy forces might thus be able to create change from within were promptly dashed when Beijing’s appointed figures invented a new rule they used to retroactively disqualify all political opponents from office.