| Abstract: | Given the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and the large-scale Anti-Extradition protests in 2019, Hong Kong filmmakers have been vigorously engaged in filmmaking, while intervening in the socio-political scenarios by referring to the current turbulent Hong Kong social movements with their filmic works. The term “post-Umbrella Movement films” has also been subsequently raised by the scholars and critics (Tam 2017; Lee 2017; Lee 2019) corresponding to Hong Kong’s socio-political conditions. However, most of the existing literature mainly focuses on the 2015 Hong Kong film “Ten Years” (Carrico 2017; Chan 2017; Fang 2018; Wu 2018; Lee 2019; Shi 2019; Wu 2020), whereas the researches on other filmic works regarding Hong Kong social protests are relatively lacking. Hence, this research aims to focus on several independent Hong Kong short films, while exploring how the filmic aesthetics and politics can be shown in these independent Hong Kong short films as the filmmakers’ response to the Anti-Extradition protests in 2019 particularly, as well as to the overall Hong Kong socio-political scenarios in general. To be specific, using four independent Hong Kong short films as case studies, which are “Night is Young” (dir. Kwok Zune, 2020), “After the Riots, Before the Liberation” (dir. Chung Hong Iu, 2020), “Stay If You Can/Go If You Must” (dir. Elysa Wendi, 2019), and “Room 525” (dir. Wai Shing Lee and Elysa Wendi, 2019), this research highlights the unique narrative strategies and experimental cinematic aesthetics intertwined with fictional images, non-fictional documentary footages of social protests, and photographic images in these independent Hong Kong short films. It also analyzes the interviews with the directors and their related discourses, alongside the issues in film production, circulation and (self-)censorship. Finally, this research examines independent Hong Kong short films vis-à-vis the filmic aesthetics and their political agency, while hoping to expand the research scope on the Hong Kong protest films and to build up more dialogues with the studies on contemporary Hong Kong cinema and the Hong Kong post-Umbrella Movement films. |
