Every person has the right to creation and expression. Art must meet individual needs as well as communal needs. Therefore, the individual must have the freedom to produce any painting, novel, poem, and film that they desire. The community must have the freedom to share and promote whatever art they wish. All art must be included.
Forget Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In times of distress when we can’t meet our basic survival needs — and we have no power to help ourselves — we escape. Art and entertainment help us bear with the world’s suffering. We have never waited until our health, financial, and psychological needs were all met before appreciating art.
Therefore, it is cruel and inhuman to restrain creative production. Censorship and its resulting phenomenon of Pre-Censorship have no place in our world. As long as there is suffering, discomfort, boredom, depression, and anxiety, humans should be able to create and consume art. As a result, we must end censorship through whatever means possible.
Firstly, we must identify why censorship exists in a particular space. Often, a nation wants to control information to benefit their central ideology. In America, we ban books for sexual content or racially-sensitive content. During the Cold War, we banned everything that even hinted at communist sympathies, including people. Across the Pacific, they censored a fair share of capitalist-democratic material. Censorship is state-power. Freedom is human-power.
Freedom, however, should not be confused as a free-for-all. People become inhumane when they disguise malicious intents under the word “freedom.” Art has neither good nor bad, but humans who abuse creative freedoms by threatening violence against others have no place in a world of creative freedom. But let us believe in a future where these dreams are achievable.
After identifying the reason for censorship, we must develop our belief that we can dissolve censorship. We must suspend our disbelief as easily as we do for film. Dreams become reality as soon as the actors believe they can perform. So, let us suspend our disbelief that individuals cannot overthrow systems of power. Let us instead squeeze every drop of hope we have left towards this fight for freedom. We must protect the arts and all of our creative minds.
Thirdly, we must eliminate pre-censorship, which manifests from a resigned public that would rather choose an easy way out than continue to challenge and risk themselves for true creativity. Pre-censorship is the lack of hope. It is conformity in the most damaging sense. We understand that working under limitations blooms truly innovative ideas. However, restricting yourself from certain topics means that you want other people to suffer. Let us take China, the country I am tethered to and must care for by nature of my ancestry. As of now, China’s largest censorship scandals center around the Uygur minorities, Tibet, the Tiananmen Massacre, and the atrocities of the Great Famine.
This manifesto is a recognition of all of the filmmakers — both in and beyond China — who prevent themselves from talking about these topics to avoid friction. This is for the filmmakers who have not received an education on creative thinking and have instead deluded themselves into thinking that entertaining the masses is the best they can achieve. This is for the young creatives entering an environment that silences them before they begin to speak.
We call for the freedom of creativity in nations burdened by censorship. For these countries that seek greater power, but stifle themselves from lionization by suppressing their people. Let people speak, let people watch, let people write, let people create.