The director of "Far From Home,” a short, intimate film about a family caught in the tumult of the 2019 anti-government protests in Hong Kong, had hoped to show off her work at a local film festival in June.
Then the censors stepped in.
They told the director, Mok Kwan-ling, that her film’s title — which in Cantonese could carry a suggestion of cleaning up after a crime — must go. Dialogue expressing sympathy for an arrested protester had to be excised. Scenes of removing items from a room also had to be cut, apparently because they might be construed as concealing evidence.