Almost three years to the day after the 2014 Umbrella Movement shut down parts of Hong Kong, thousands of people once again took to the streets Sunday.

As the city's government marked the 68th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, protesters wearing black braved stifling heat and pouring rain to call for the release of "political prisoners" jailed last month, including Umbrella leaders Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow.

Those arrests marked a turnaround from 2014, when the trio helped bring out hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to call for a more direct form of democracy in the former British colony.