Five years ago, when demonstrators occupied roads in the heart of Hong Kong to demand (ultimately in vain) democratic reforms, the urgency of the moment was already coming into greater focus. After the movement failed to win any concessions, new political parties emerged, calling for more radical measures such as self-determination or even Hong Kong’s full independence from China, and faith in the city’s political system fell precipitously.

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One young protester I spoke to, who asked not to be identified because she feared retribution, told me how those 2014 protests, the Umbrella Movement, awakened her to the political complexities at play. Born in the year of the handover, she spoke of how the 2047 deadline had determined the way she saw her own future. “In very few situations do you have to plan for the next 50 years when you’re 20,” she told me. “It’s not because of some career advancement; it’s because you literally don’t know whether your home is going to exist in 2047.”

She is not alone in that view: When members of the public were invited to put questions to Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, at an event in September, a young man pointed out that she would be 90 years old in 2047, but he would be only 55. The expiration date might not matter to her at that age, he said, but it would still matter to him. “After 2047, do we have a future?” he asked.

Au himself has spent a great deal of time and energy considering what the future might look like for the city’s residents. Dialect, a short film that he directed, was one of five works by different directors featured in Ten Years, a 2015 movie that depicted Hong Kongers’ worst fears as the clock ticks toward the end of the guarantee on the territory’s semiautonomous status. In Dialect, a taxi driver struggles to make a living because of new rules that stipulate he must speak Mandarin, the official language of mainland China, rather than Hong Kong’s dominant language, Cantonese.

Set in 2025, Ten Years resonated with Hong Kongers; at the showing I attended when it was first released, a young primary-school teacher sitting next to me was in tears. Envisioning events such as the imprisoning of activists and the quashing of an independence movement, the film has already proved prescient. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it was banned on the mainland, where it was declared a “thought virus” by the state-controlled Global Times newspaper and struggled to get a proper run in Hong Kong cinemas, despite sold-out shows. Au still sees the film as relevant now. “The taxi driver is the Hong Kong people if we lose this battle,” he said.

Fears for Hong Kong’s future were not always so prevalent. The origins of the 2047 deadline date back to the 19th-century Opium Wars, when China ceded parts of Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity and leased one area, the northern New Territories, for 99 years, a period that ended in 1997. As that date drew near, the two nations opened talks to decide Hong Kong’s fate, eventually signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. That treaty laid out the terms of the handover, stipulating that Hong Kong would fall under the direct authority of Beijing, but also awarding it a high degree of autonomy, a “one country, two systems” formula. Its capitalist system and liberties unseen on the mainland, including an independent judiciary and freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, would be protected for a half century.