Imagining the future in post-millennial Hong Kong cinema: Visualizing the local, the national and the global in cultural imaginaries

Abstract

Decolonization in the context of Hong Kong involves a ‘complex series of cultural-political struggles to re-imagine the future for the next 30 years and beyond,’ according to Chan’s “Delay No More: Struggles to Re-Imagine Hong Kong” (2015). In this regard, the bottom-up decolonization to be achieved by the local subjects and the projection of the future extended from cultural imaginaries are reciprocally connected. Building on this, the current study illustrates how locally produced images about the future constellate the local, the national and the global in the transforming post-handover setting of Hong Kong. With an eye to Golden Chicken II (Samson Chiu, 2003), Ten Years (omnibus, 2015) and She Remembers, He Forgets (Adam Wong, 2015), this study examines how Hong Kong’s future is respectively envisioned after the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2014 Umbrella Movement, as these films by traversing the mainstream and the non-mainstream circuits coincide on the ambivalent feeling towards the future, wherever it is located, and the general concern towards those disappeared/disappearing values, identities and lifestyle that have long been taken for granted as ‘Hong Kong’. From the alternating utopian and dystopian projections of Hong Kong’s future, this study discerns the experimental attempts to self-decolonization by trial and error and unfolds the preferred local-national-global relations especially in the post-Umbrella Movement era before the eruption of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protests.