Yet, beyond offering emotional catharsis, one can also read a script of hope buried amidst the rubble of despair. For a film that was released a year after the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which by then was already characterized by some as a “failed movement,” the hopelessness of Season of the End found emotional resonance with protestors and supporters of the movement. It is somber, meditative, and brimming with an abject hopelessness that unfurls slowly throughout. Instead of focusing on structures of political oppression, Season of the End turns to the affective aftermath of Hong Kong’s turmoil, speaking in coded terms about what comes after revolutionary fervor. Dressed in pallid and desaturated tones, this story departs from the other three short films that openly ruminate on the ways authoritarian rule could unfold in Hong Kong. He tugs at the doorknob, angrily urging Wong to open the door, and raises a hatchet to break down the wall… Directed by Wong Fei-pang, Season of the End is one of four short films featured in the anthology movie Ten Years (2015).
Later, in what appears to be a moment of reanimation, Lau rises from his seat and speaks to Wong through a locked door, telling her that he feels younger and that he had woken from a very long dream.
She collects his sweat droplets, gathers samples of his hair, and observes him through a peephole as he sits in an adjacent room, ingesting coagulant, effectively embalming himself. A sorrowful but loving montage unfolds after Wong reluctantly agrees. Lau eventually asks Wong to take their work to its logical and inevitable conclusion: by turning him into a specimen as well. While he lives as a human being, the inevitable trajectory towards death means that the fate of becoming an inanimate, dead object looms over his living days. Quietly, the duo fixates on indexing, boxing, vacuum-sealing, and bottling food scraps, soap, and photographs, until “radually, there were more specimens than objects left in the city.” The process of specimen-making-a meticulous process that suspends objects in a moment in time, a limbo state of stasis for study and archival purposes-surfaces a set of philosophical tensions for Lau. While the city’s bright lights and skyscrapers remain tall and gleaming, the Hong Kong that immediately surrounds Wong and Lau is vacant and crumbling. The duo carefully preserves broken household objects, lifting ceramic shards out of the debris with tweezers and collecting pieces of concrete in glass jars. The short film Season of the End opens with Wong Ching and Lau Ho-chi, a pair of protestors in Hong Kong, sifting through the remains of a fellow protestor’s bulldozed home.
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