This essay revisits the circumstances under which the low-budget Hong Kong independent film Ten Years became a transnational film phenomenon. As an example of bottom-up resistance to official censorship, Ten Years is also a product of an emergent politics of media consumption characterized by a participatory mode of film and media spectatorship. While the film’s success has inspired adaptations of the “Ten Years model” in Thailand, Japan, and Taiwan, it is also a product of the prevailing censorship regimes in Hong Kong and China that are exercising both overt and covert controls over the film production and exhibition within its bounds. The film’s iconic singularity, therefore, also bespeaks the predicaments of making politically engaged films in Hong Kong today.