HONG KONG — Counterfeit money is hidden. Police uncover the stash. Justice is served.

It may sound like a film noir plot, but the fake bills had been used as props in an award-winning crime thriller filmed in Hong Kong. And the two suspects — who received suspended four-month sentences on Thursday — were not hardened criminal counterfeiters but members of a film production crew.

The question, local cinephiles say, is why the police even bothered to seek charges.

They say the case illustrates how onerous rules are needlessly hampering a local industry whose golden age of Bruce Lee kung fu films and Wong Kar-wai dramas seems long past, and which is now struggling to compete against rising competition from studios in South Korea and mainland China.

“It’s hypocritical,” Kevin Ma, the founder of Asia in Cinema, a news site for the regional industry, said of the convictions. Even as Hong Kong officials talk of supporting local filmmakers, he said, “they have these really weird, arcane laws that prevent the industry from putting in serious production values.”

In a statement, the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers called the sentence “unprecedented in the history of film industries around the world.” And the Hong Kong Film Arts Association said it was concerned because local laws governing the industry were hopelessly outdated and full of “gray areas that make it exceedingly easy for people in the industry to become accidentally entrapped.”