A recent world premiere at the Hot Docs Film Festival, Faceless is a vital slice of 21st-century dissent portraiture, a nonfiction work that paradoxically locates a reservoir of humanizing empathy chiefly through its focus on masked protestors. An engaging directorial debut from Jennifer Ngo, the movie provides a gripping look at the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations against a controversial Chinese extradition bill, as seen through the eyes of various young women and men seeking to protect what they view as their way of life.

Ever since Great Britain’s 1997 handover of sovereignty of the territory to China, designating Hong Kong a special administrative region as part of a “one country, two systems” agreement lasting 50 years, mainland China’s ruling Communist Party has sought to exercise greater control over both bureaucratic and social systems within Hong Kong.

In order to help maintain the anonymity of its subjects, Faceless not only interviews them in the face coverings they wear in the streets in order to blend in with one another, and also preserve an element of plausible deniability if arrested individually – masks that would have seemed foreign or perhaps off-putting at the time of its production, but now part of normal life for the last year-plus for so many of us. It also bestows upon them monikers – such as “The Artist,” “The Believer,” “The Student,” etcetera – which rather cannily identify entirely different segments of the broader, youth-driven coalition.

Intercut with thoughtful reflections from these interviewees is on-the-street footage which often showcases the creativity of protestors’ tactical engagement with police officers, including a continuously updated map room in which live updates are pinned to a board, and screenshots shared across a variety of mobile apps. As the protest against a specific piece of legislation morphs and matures into a broader democracy and social justice movement, the film’s subjects are all forced to grapple with their diverse and sometimes at-odds strategies, as well as reflect upon individual motives, values, and personal relationships. Faceless builds to a climax set during the 13-day siege of Polytechnic University, in November 2019.

Briskly paced at 82 minutes, Faceless is highly experiential, yes. And at times it courses with energy that complements the verve and spiritedness of its subjects – composer Harris Tartell’s score giving the clandestine installation of Banksy-style protest art, for example, an especially charged feeling. But Ngo’s movie is not only this, nor overly so. While its handheld frontlines footage gives it a bracing immediacy, Faceless is also filmic and stitched together with a smart, zoomed-out sense of its macro thematic explorations. It finds smart details around the edges – a jostled protestor wearing a “Where Dreamers Become Doers” T-shirt – and incorporates them into a more settled and ruminative story about fear, faith, and youthful idealism feeling sincerely summoned to action.

In Faceless, the story of the contentious bill, eventually withdrawn after 137 days of social turmoil, is explained mostly in broad strokes, and little effort is made to explain local governmental justifications or defense of the bill. But Ngo’s background as a journalist does comes through in her skill with juggling the personal and the political, foregrounding the former in order to cast the latter into relief, and also throwing a light on the historical context of the carefully ratcheted-up nature of China’s various incursions into Hong Kong’s freedoms.

If there is a shortcoming to the film, it comes in an intriguing thread too quickly abandoned. One portion of the movie assays so-called “parents” – slightly older citizens who serve as a type of army supply-line, secretly funneling gloves, goggles, hard-shell helmets, masks, chemical irritant eyewash, and other tangible goods to those on the frontlines of the protests. One of these interviewees speaks briefly, and touchingly, about his sense of duty to help protect Hong Kong’s future, about how he realizes both his access to other resources and his ability to move through certain areas undetected or unbothered can be put to use. Regrettably, this segment is over almost as soon as it begins, which feels like a missed bridge-building opportunity to more fully connect different generations of Hongkongers – and, by extension, perhaps different generations of international viewers, who might feel disconnected from forms of protest in the digital era, or for some reason view tangible, direct dissent as exclusively the province of the young.