Asian Cinema - Documentary and Democracy, Hong Kong, Oct 2022

My article reassesses the direct cinema documentaries of respected and influential documentarians, festival organizers and documentary teachers Tammy Cheung and Augustine Lam in the light of the profound changes Hong Kong has experienced since their work was produced and distributed in the first decade of the new millennium. The present commentary on their body of work is conceived primarily as a critical retrospective, although it seems highly like they will continue to make films in self-imposed exile related to the new Hong Kong diaspora. In this article I am interested in tracing a through-line in their work and connecting the subject-matter of their sociological documentaries with the profound changes that have taken place in Hong Kong society and culture over the past few years.

In the history of Hong Kong, the two largest and most impactful waves of social movements took place in the 1960s–70s and in the 2010s. The two documentaries-pair, 香港保衛釣魚台示威 (The Protect Diao Yu Islands Protest in Hong Kong) (1971) and 給香港的文藝青年 (To Hong Kong Intellectual Youths) (1978) produced by the anarcho-pacifist 70年代雙週刊 (The 70’s Biweekly) syndicate, and 佔領立法會 (Taking Back the Legislature) (2020) and 理大圍城 (Inside the Red Brick Wall) (2020) produced by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers effectively construct a ‘We’ of the protesters in alliance in the Butlerian sense. In the case of the 2020 films, this ‘We’ is unwittingly expanded by the government by imposing censorship on them, thus creating another layer of alliance with some Hong Kongers who might not have even watched the films, but stand in solidarity with the filmmakers in defending freedom of expression.

Building upon the momentum of protests, Hong Kong independent documentarians have made efforts to record the past decade’s social movements. From the 2014 Umbrella Movement to the 2019–20 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, more than a dozen feature-length and short documentaries of different social movements were produced. As political pressure has grown increasingly intense in recent years, the media landscape has been changing rapidly. This article applies the Foucauldian concept of dispositif to analyse these changes. If dispositif can be understood as pertaining to the regulation of power relations, then the dispositif of recent Hong Kong independent political documentaries can illuminate a crucial aspect of the changes: Mainland China and Hong Kong’s closer relationship as a regulating dispositif. Through the case of Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020) and the implementation of the Hong Kong version of the National Security Law, the article shows how this regulating dispositif has recently pushed the deterritorialization of Hong Kong independent political documentary.

Established by several independent filmmakers in Hong Kong in 1997, Ying E Chi (YEC) has facilitated the production and the distribution of Hong Kong independent films by means of VCD/DVD releases, video streaming, film festivals and community screenings. The non-profit body has played a key role in aiding local independent filmmakers’ projects, seeking film distribution opportunities locally and transnationally and building community networks in its home city. As the organizer of the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival since 2008, YEC has demonstrated its fluid translocal positioning by not just promoting the works of local filmmakers, but also introducing worldwide independent cinema to Hong Kong audiences. In retrospect, the development of YEC has reflected the transforming cultural landscape of Hong Kong to different degrees. From cinephiles and academics to the public, the audiences YEC has developed over the years indicates an ever-changing spectatorship in the making, bespeaking the various responses to the social environment under which these films were made, shown and watched. This article will use YEC as a case study to explore the mutual impacts between documentary films and their spectatorship which have shaped independent filmmakers’ production and distribution strategies continuously in postmillennial Hong Kong, particularly in the wake of the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. The article will draw on interviews with local independent filmmakers, in order to understand how industry practices and dynamics have responded to identification, social events and audience behaviours over time. In this regard, spectatorship is understood as not just an embodied experience of film viewing, but also a series of affinities between the filmmaker, the audience and the film work. As a whole, the article will probe how the idea of citizen-spectator has evolved and has become inscribed in spectatorial engagement with independent documentary films, which has oscillated between audiences’ approval and authorities’ disapproval in postmillennial Hong Kong.

This article is an ethnographic and historical study that focuses on the ‘plebeian public sphere’ – a democratic sphere opened up by the community screening of independent documentary films. My article argues that this innovative public screening establishes a mode of communication that connects audiences with the neighbourhood where people gather together and form local communities by sharing experience and emotion based on history, story and memory. This process evokes a source of affective energy that is capable of catalysing social change. It challenges not only previous theoretical approaches to the public sphere, but also the stereotypical understanding of ‘the public’ in the Hong Kong context.

Recent years have demonstrated the rise of localism worldwide. In an Asian context, we are witnessing an increasing number of protest events and numerous social movement documentaries being produced. In Hong Kong, Edward Tin-kei Leung 梁天琦 was the first self-proclaimed localist to participate in a democratic election and the first to be charged for riot since the Handover. The documentary film of Leung’s story, Lost in the Fumes, achieved an impressive degree of popularity among local people during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) movement. Analysing its storylines and plots, as well as filming techniques, from the perspectives of film studies and cultural studies, together with several interviews as a supplement, this article examines the emotional connections of films and protesting bodies in social movements. It explores the cinematic representation of Leung and how this representation was received by viewers to facilitate self-mobilization in the Anti-ELAB Movement. Hence, I will analyse the functions of films as a cultural or emotional foundation in social movements that facilitate the creation of a shared emotional engagement.

This article examines how the documentary film Raise the Umbrellas (Evans Chan 2016) enacts a more democratic form of collective memory that generates a politics of hope by remembering the failed 2014 Umbrella Movement for universal suffrage. I argue that the documentary engages in democratic remembering by taking an agonistic and pluralist view of the movement, emphasizing the intersubjective and recursive circulation of collective memories of the event and poeticizing the failure of the movement. Through aesthetic commemoration that emphasizes the value of failed political resistance, the film generates hope – the most basic and fundamental requirement for democratization.