Community Building Through Screen Sharing: Community Screening as Cultural Practice in Postmillennial Hong Kong and Beyond

Abstract

Community screenings in this study are understood as the exhibition of moving images outside conventional theatres and commercial circuits. Based on fieldwork observations and interviews conducted between January 2019 and January 2020 with film workers, community groups, and venue providers who knitted together a rhizomatic community screening network in Hong Kong, this paper explores the (self-)making of urban cultural space by way of the reinvention of “screens” and the rebuilding of a place-based, people-centred community with ethical concerns for small businesses, artists, craftspeople, workers, and members of the public during the first two decades of postmillennial era. The paper concludes with some observations about the phenomenal shift in not only the mode, but also the site of film dissemination from Hong Kong to overseas diasporic communities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and following the emigration wave in the 2020s.

Introduction

The beginning of the 2020s witnessed the dissemination of Hong Kong films outside their place of production after a variety of films, from commercial and independent productions to documentaries and dramas, found circulation abroad through theatrical releases and community screenings. Although the Hong Kong film industry has a long history of exportation, this phenomenon, though perhaps momentary, is worth examining as it contrasts with the general retrocession of the filmmaking industry and the theatre business following the interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering the situation in Hong Kong, in 2020, box office revenues experienced a plunge of 72 per cent: theatres were required to shut down three times over a period of nearly one-third of the year due to pandemic restrictions, and when cinemas were allowed to operate, seat occupancy was restricted to ensure social distancing (Man, 2021). In March 2021, the once-successful UA Cinemas chain, which had been operating in the territory since 1985, closed down all its theatres (Magramo, 2021). Likewise, film production in Hong Kong was in decline: in 2022, only twenty-seven locally produced films were released, compared with thirty-four films in 2020 and forty-six films in 2021 (Woo, 2024). In addition to the pandemic, the socio-cultural landscape of Hong Kong was impacted by paradigmatic shifts over the course and in the wake of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement (Chan, 2022; Davis, 2021; Fung and Pun, 2021; Lee, 2020). In the context of film distribution, one of the watershed moments involved the legislature's amendment of the Film Censorship Ordinance in October 2021, granting authorities the power to ban films in the name of safeguarding national security, and a punishment of up to three years in prison and an HKD 1 million penalty for any person who exhibited an unauthorised film (Ho, 2021; Woo, 2024). Regardless, in 2023, the Hong Kong box office generated a revenue of HKD 1.43 billion – 25 per cent more than the previous year but still 25 per cent less than the pre-pandemic 2019 – with forty-six local titles and 221 imported films (Frater, 2024).

Despite these ups and downs, specific Hong Kong-produced films found their way to silver screens in Canada, Taiwan, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), among other regions, in the early 2020s. Community screenings and theatrical releases marked two trajectories in these overseas disseminations. In the early phase, individual efforts played a significant part in initiating and organising film screenings. For instance, in some major cities such as Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, protest-themed documentaries, including but not limited to Inside the Red Brick Wall (Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, 2020), Take Back the Legislature (Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, 2020), and the Cannes Film Festival-debuted Revolution of Our Times (Chow, 2021), were introduced to overseas audiences at ticketed community screening events in rental theatres. Later on, a variety of drama films, such as The Sparring Partner (Ho, 2022), Lost Love (Ka, 2022), A Guilty Conscience (Ng, 2023), and Table for Six 1 and 2 (Chan, 2022, 2024), were brought into overseas commercial theatres, following their popularity in Hong Kong. In the context of North America distribution companies specializing in Hong Kong films such as Illume Films and Canadian HongKonger Incorporated for Motion-picture & Entertainment (CHIME) were both established in 2022. A similar trend was also observed in the UK with the establishment of Haven Productions, a UK-based film distribution and production company formed by Hong Kong director Ng Ka-Leung in 2021, and Hong Kong Film Festival UK, a multi-city film screening programme formed in 2022. Across these locales, film-viewing events were well attended by Hong Kong immigrants from different generations (Mycroft, 2023). In particular, both the Canada and the UK cases were in conjunction with Hong Kong's population outflow (Chan et al., 2022; Li and Liao, 2023; Yan et al., 2023). The emigration wave, in part, explained the sudden surge in overseas demand for cultural products from or about Hong Kong, alongside the transmission of cultural memories and social sentiments that were embedded in the process of consumption. Despite uncertainty as to how long the bid would last, the market share of these made in Hong Kong films remained marginal in non-local contexts. In this regard, the overseas circulation of Hong Kong films in the post-2019, post-pandemic era was founded on a bottom-up, community-oriented mode of distribution primarily supported by immigrant communities.

Regardless of how viewership in different locales evolved, it is important to note that these film circulation strategies facilitated by community organisations and start-up distribution companies in the early 2020s shared roots with the community screening model that used to operate in Hong Kong until around 2020. To shed light on the overseas spectatorship and translocal film circulation trajectories abovementioned, this article will present an in-depth study on the community screening practices that were developed in pre-2019, pre-pandemic Hong Kong. Supplemented by a series of structured and unstructured interviews conducted with several Hong Kong-based non-profit community organisations which organised community screenings regularly during the 2010s, this article will present three case studies: Centre for Community Cultural Development (CCCD) Artspace Green Wave Art (碧波押, bi bo ya; hereafter, Green Wave Art), an art space that was located in the bustling grassroots district of Yau Ma Tei; the House of To Kwa Wan Stories (a.k.a. To Ga; 土家, tu jia), a community project with a physical hub in its namesake district zoned for redevelopment; and HK Community Cinema (社區院線, she ju yuan xian), a group with a sole focus on organising public screenings, indoors and outdoors, at different locations across the territory. Importantly, the analysis took into account the intersections of grounded experience, community participation, and cultural practice in analysing the interconnection between screen sharing and community building and the resulting social relations. As a whole, the study examined the film distribution and circulation trends that contributed to a spectatorship-in-the-making through community screening activities and practices in Hong Kong in the post-Umbrella Movement era and in the lead-up to the Anti-ELAB Movement, before their transposition to overseas contexts in the 2020s.

Community Screening: Towards a Shared, Dispersed Spectatorship

Community screenings in this study are understood as the exhibition of moving images outside conventional theatres and commercial circuits. One exemplar is the territory-wide circulation of the Hong Kong indie film Ten Years (2015) throughout 2016 in reaction to viewers’ demands for the film and the disproportionate number of screens available in theatres. As a case in point, on 1 April 2016, the film was simultaneously screened at thirty-six locations across the city. Over thirty-four voluntary partners – including student groups, district-based concern groups, and non-profit organisations – participated by providing venues, audio-visual equipment (e.g. screens, projectors, and speakers), and operational support. On the day of the screening, viewers and passers-by filled communal spaces such as schools and community halls, make-shift spaces such as street corners and beneath flyovers, and repurposed spaces such as the rooftop of an industrial building, transforming the film-viewing activity into a collective experience and a visual spectacle – especially ironic as the film was known for presenting a future that many considered dystopian (Wu, 2018, 2022). The practice of community screenings in Hong Kong did not start with Ten Years alone; beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, community screenings were organised by cinephiles and non-profit groups, including but not limited to V-Artivist (影行者, ying xing zhe), New Wave Motion (筆記電影會, bi ji dian ying hui), Kai Fong Pai Dong (街坊排檔, jie fang pai dang; literally, neighbourhood hawker stalls), and the three organisations in focus – HK Community Cinema, Green Wave Art, and the House of To Kwa Wan Stories (see Chiu, 2022). With an eye to screen-sharing activities, community screening events were characterised by their flexible use of urban space, interactions between film viewers and cultural practitioners, emphasis on communal bonding, and valorisation of freedom of choice.

In the context of postmillennial Hong Kong, community screenings functioned as an “alternative public sphere” – a “structural possibility of articulating experience in a communicative, relatively autonomous form” (Hansen, 1991: 90; see Chiu, 2022). Nevertheless, screen sharing and watching moving images in public spaces were not new. Under the British administration of Hong Kong, community television sets were first installed by the colonial government at public sites in 1965. According to the Urban Council, in April 1967, there were more than 1,700 people watching television in Victoria Park every day. By the end of 1968, over 100 community television sets were available in the New Territories. According to the Government Information Services, the aim was to introduce televisions to inhabitants in rural areas (Hampton, 2011). During the 1960s and 1970s, in the densely populated urban environment, many assumed the habit of watching their neighbours’ televisions before the territory's household television ownership jumped from 12 per cent in 1967 to 90 per cent in 1976 (Cheuk, 1999). From the 1960s to the postmillennial era, the nature and motif of public screenings had changed. By the 2010s, technologically engineered cinematic pleasure brought about by surround sound systems, IMAX screens, 3D effects, and vibrating seats was no stranger to filmgoers in Hong Kong. In other words, the film-viewing experience engendered by community screenings – including the occurrence of technical issues and unexpected disruptions caused by urban noise, street activities, and changing weather, among other distractions – went against the audio-visual enjoyment guaranteed by what audiences expected from conventional theatres, and this made the practice and trend of community screenings in postmillennial Hong Kong stand out. Following the Ten Years phenomenon, by the late 2010s, the momentum gained by community screenings and support from local filmmakers, viewers, and members of the public indicated an urge to come into contact with locally oriented representations, as well as action against potential political censorship in view of the increasing difficulty of circulating work related to social activism, such as Raise the Umbrellas (Chan, 2016), Yellowing (Chan, 2016), and Lost in the Fumes (Lam, 2017), especially in conventional cinema circuits despite the presence of a robust demand for these social-movement documentaries.

As will be revealed by the following three case studies, community screenings amplified a sense of togetherness, not only at the showing of a film, but also during the organisation and participation processes (e.g. interactions during post-screening discussions and the reflections they sparked). The experiences and impacts generated by community screenings in postmillennial Hong Kong, as well as the intersection of spectatorship and community that contributed to the spectator experience, could be understood by following film scholar Carlos Comanducci's attention to the “discursivity of experience, the heteronomy of the subject, the contingence of spectatorship, the free associative character of an extended dimension of spectatorship and the indeterminacy of embodiment” (2018: 10, 12). Moreover, film theorist Francesco Casetti pointed out that against the backdrop of the twenty-first century, the “intervention by the spectators” and the migration of spectatorship to spaces outside film theatres were inevitable (2011: 6). Casetti also regarded the sensory, cognitive, and emotional aspects of a filmic experience as something “conventional” and discerned “new levels of doing” via the technological, the relational, the expressive, and the textual (2011: 6). What is also relevant to the discussion in this article is that the choice, apparatus, and purpose of viewing were integral to the meaning-making process: a film was not just “an object of vision” but was also “a collectable, a cult object, or something to be manipulated or exchanged through file-sharing programmes” (Casetti, 2011: 6). Hence, the film-viewing activity itself (community screening in this case) embodied meaning-making, place-making, and community-building potentialities – in Casetti's words, “spectators watch[ed] films by themselves and [were] often motivated to construct a group with which to share their own experience” (2011: 7). As the other side of the same coin, in examining the history of American cinema, film scholar Julian Hanich (2014) pointed out two film-viewing models, namely, the Conversational Theatre proposed by poet Vachel Lindsay in 1915 and the Invisible Cinema designed by Peter Kubelka in 1970, which were independent from one another. Meanwhile, whether it was a “quiet attentive” or “expressive and distracted” spectatorship, Hanich (2014: 342) emphasised that film viewing was always a collective experience, where emotions were shared and shaped with respect to the screening format, the design of the venue, the number of spectators involved, and other circumstantial factors.

In the case of postmillennial Hong Kong, the irregularity of community screenings and the film-viewing experiences they engendered not just resembled primitive cinematic experiences documented in early film history, but with the social and cultural contexts involved they also renewed and intensified Hanich's description that “quietly watching a film as part of a collective [was] a shared activity based on a we-intention and a joint attention focused on a collective intentional object” (2014: 339). All these discussions were the basis for this study to explore the social–cultural community-building capacity embodied by community screenings in the three case studies that follow.

Method

Considering the diverse modes of public screenings, community screenings in postmillennial Hong Kong can neither be squarely reduced to a single film-viewing model nor an irreversible transformation that drew habitual filmgoers away from cinemas. In that case, community screenings cannot be studied as a stand-alone entity solely on a theoretical level. With the aim of presenting a holistic view of the community screening practices in postmillennial Hong Kong, I conducted a series of structured and unstructured interviews in Hong Kong between January 2019 and January 2020 that included screening organisers, venue providers, film and cultural organisations, and indie filmmakers who had exhibited their work through community screenings. The interviews addressed the practical as well as the aspirational aspects of community building, with community screening as a focus. The topics discussed included, but were not limited to, planning and operations; curatorship; participants’ reception; the relationship between organisers, venue providers, filmmakers, and audiences; and the roles played by the venue, the film, and the activity itself. These exchanges and observations formed part of a larger research interest not only in the organisation and operation of community screenings, but also in the making of a bottom-up, shared, and dispersed spectatorship that was informed by and reflective of sociocultural relations in the region. In the scope of this article, Green Wave Art, the House of To Kwa Wan Stories, and HK Community Cinema were chosen as case studies for their representativeness in terms of their structures, organisational strategies, and interactions with audiences, cultural practitioners, and small businesses in the community. In particular, all three hubs were incubated between 2014 and 2016, exhibiting various forms of community engagement and urban activism developed after the Umbrella Movement. The three groups ceased operating between 2020 and 2021.

In what follows, Green Wave Art's undertaking was an experiment in blurring the boundary between the arts scene, the community, and mundane life; the House of To Kwa Wan Stories aimed to unveil the actor-network of film viewing and community building by creating social bonds in its neighbourhood; and HK Community Cinema endeavoured to maintain its role as an intermediary in cultivating a fair film-watching and distribution environment that emphasised equity between filmmakers, distributors, and spectators. As a whole, the three case studies will demonstrate how community screenings provided an alternative way of film watching and public gatherings and gave rise to different spectatorships in the community that were driven by social innovation, cultural entrepreneurship, and ethical concerns.

Case Study I: CCCD Artspace Green Wave Art

Overview

Located at 404 Shanghai Street, Green Wave Art was an art space run by the CCCD, with financial support from the Art Development Council, between 2016 and 2018. Under the deliberation of the curator, a performance artist who often connected their work with current affairs and social issues, the versatile and creative space hosted film screenings, exhibitions, concerts, and talks, in addition to a myriad of community activities and even outings, despite limited resources and workforce. In the spirit of community art, Green Wave Art emphasised communal participation in art and the services provided by art to the community. This case study explored the positioning of film viewers and screening organisers in relation to citizens.

Since its inauguration in 2016 and until its closure in August 2019, Green Wave Art organised at least 198 public screenings, approximately one to two sessions per week, in their gallery. In collaboration with academics, critics, and filmmakers, Green Wave Art called their signature film programme the “Film Autonomous Region,” with a primary focus on non-mainstream, low-budget independent documentaries produced in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan. In partnership with film organisations such as the Chinese Independent Documentary Lab, Ying E Chi, Visible Record, and Cinezen, Green Wave Art enjoyed an extensive and communicative network. Not only was the matter of screening rights directly discussed between filmmakers and screening organisers, but filmmakers were also invited to present their works and interact with the audience in person, whenever possible. In addition, Green Wave Art provided a screening venue for other community organisations (including HK Community Cinema, which will be discussed in the last case study) and film festivals, such as the 1905 Human Rights Film Festival Hong Kong and a retrospective on Chinese indie documentaries produced after 1997. By doing so, the regular screenings organised by Green Wave Art provided a habitual space to watch films in the community. While the communal spectatorship generated by Green Wave Art was one without any box office or revenue-generating pressure, it encompassed the participation of spectators, filmmakers, critics, and screening organisers and facilitated their mutual growth. This mode of direct distribution, furthermore, brought agency to filmmaking by detouring the “jurisdiction” of the market to minimise any interference in subject matter and ensuring the creative autonomy of filmmakers.

Discussion of the Findings

As emphasised by the curator, Green Wave Art was motivated by its goal to “serve the kaifong” (街坊, jie fang, neighbourhood residents) – kaifong is the transliteration of a Cantonese term that broadly refers to the residents of an area (Anonymous 1, 2020). By organising screening events as well as running different schemes related to recycling, electrical apparatus maintenance, book drafting, tutorial aid for school children, and family portrait-taking, Green Wave Art not only took the initiative to reach out to the kaifong, but also created opportunities for urban dwellers to make appearances at their “storefront.” Green Wave Art integrated itself into the community on a street level, inasmuch as the kaifong – who lived in different types of lodgings nearby, including cage homes and shared flats, and worked in bustling areas – became accustomed to the presence of Green Wave Art. Participatory, creative, and self-reflexive in nature, the events devised by Green Wave Art always enabled participants, organisers, and artists to interact with one another, the art space, and the city. The convivial nature of the community screenings and the cultural network built up behind them offered an alternate route for films, their creators, and viewers to encounter each other in the community. Indeed, not all screening participants were part of the kaifong in the beginning, but they become “residents,” however, transient, by contributing their presence to the communal spectatorship built up by/in Green Wave Art.

In examining the making of American audiences, sociologist Richard Butsch (2000) traced different approaches to audience research in history, ethnography, media, communication, cultural, and feminist studies. Having explored the development of theatre, cinema, and television from 1750 to 1990, Butsch concluded that audiences were the result of “active, public gatherings” that were constantly in a dialectic between “resistance and incorporation” (2000: 294). This finding not only emancipated the audience from its stereotype as static and passive, but also revealed an actor-network pertaining to the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions of spectatorship. In light of the conceptualisation of the “audience citizen,” Butsch (2007) discovered that audiences were often evaluated on the standards of “good” citizenship and their status. In a similar vein, the positioning of the kaifong was problematised by the audience members of the community screenings, where the semantic change in the term “kaifong,” I contend, unveiled the making of their place-based identity as well as neoliberal practices in Hong Kong.

Over the course of Hong Kong history, the term kaifong – a seemingly untranslatable category that has gone by its transliteration since colonial times – has been in use since the early nineteenth century and was defined in the 1950s by two British social welfare officers as a “collective noun for the residents of a particular street or locality” (McDouall and Keen, 1955: 2). This English explanation was provided in an article tracing the post-World War II development of Kaifong welfare associations in colonial Hong Kong and the reconstruction of the public at the district level. It is noteworthy that upper-case Kaifong is used to indicate the institutionalisation that took place in the colonial era and continued after the handover in 1997, while the popularised and colloquial lower-case kaifong is used to represent the residents of an area. In this context, the Kaifong welfare associations’ networks operated with their “own spontaneous leaders,” according to the colonial social welfare officers (McDouall and Keen, 1955: 2), and were organised in a “community leadership structure” representative of “the traditional elite and the modern (industrialist-professional) elite,” as confirmed in a survey conducted in 1967 (Wong, 1972: 590). Whereas Kaifong welfare associations – understood as self-appointed neighbourhood committees – were classified as a fabric of Hong Kong's collaborative colonialism under British administration, upon the 1997 handover, the political orientation of these Kaifong welfare associations was revamped according to the change in authorities in power and “under the umbrella of governmental co-optation” (Lo et al., 2019, 225; also see Law, 2009). Nevertheless, in day-to-day colloquial speech, the term kaifong also has a depoliticised dimension, referring to “individuals residing in a neighbourhood community connected by feelings of trust and conviviality” (Lam-Knott, 2020: 6). Meanwhile, the community-driven heritage preservation campaigns that took place in Hong Kong in the mid-first decade of the twenty-first century rendered the kaifong empowered members of the local community (e.g. in the community-driven campaign against the demolition and redevelopment of Lee Tung Street in 2004 and the Viva Blue House Project initiated in 2006 [Douay, 2010]). This connotation of resilience is noteworthy, as the image of the kaifong is that of community members who express belongingness to a neighbourhood by, in this case, speaking out against the government's urban renewal plans. As such, the kaifong in this case study – self-identified as a particular neighbourhood in which Green Wave Art generated spectatorship through community screenings – constituted a resilient community that strove to preserve its community network and sustain the openness of its urban spaces.

Implications: From Audience to Kaifong

According to the curator, expressions such as “I am not a kaifong” and “I used to be a kaifong” were frequently heard at the events organised by Green Wave Art (Anonymous 1, 2020). This rhetorical structure implicated not just these urban dwellers’ auto-interpretation of the kaifong as integral members of a local community, but also their hope to be treated like them (even if they might not be “qualified” to be a kaifong according to their own understanding). Enveloping this narrative of the kaifong was, after all, recognition of a place-based community that was formed by the kaifong. Following the aspirations of Green Wave Art to (re)build a street-level kaifong network by way of the art of everyday life, the communal spectatorship that emerged out of their community-film-screening programmes not just propagated this motif, which also found expression in other community activism campaigns and sites (cf. the next case study) in post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong, it also allowed reinventions of the kaifong and audience members from existing logics and conventions, reminiscent of Comanducci's notion of “waywardness” and the need to be emancipated from the “disciplinary gaze” in order to defy the mechanisms that regulated (the interpretation of) the film experience (2018: 10).

Case Study II: The House of To Kwa Wan Stories

Overview

The House of To Kwa Wan Stories (hereafter, To Ga, which is its Cantonese name) was installed in 2014 at 16 Hung Fook Street in To Kwa Wan, one of the few districts that was still filled with tenement buildings, light industry, and small businesses in Hong Kong. The district had been included in the government's redevelopment plan in the early 2010s, and the plan to demolish the Hung Fook Street neighbourhood was announced in 2016 by the Urban Renewal Authority, a semi-government body. To Ga, literally meaning To Home, referred to itself as “an alternative community centre, a place for residents to gather, a base for volunteers and friends to brainstorm and take actions,” and it had been run by the Community Cultural Concern and Fixing Hong Kong since April 2018, despite the absence of funding (“About To Home”, 2014). In addition to community-building activities, To Ga paid close attention to the problems caused by urban redevelopment, from gentrification to the infringement of residents’ rights in forced evacuations and the absence of a fair compensation scheme. As of January 2020, To Ga had organised at least fifty to sixty screenings – often in the public space outside their storefront on Hung Fook Street, occasionally in nearby Hoi Sham Park, and very seldom on a rooftop – with an average audience size of twenty to thirty people. This case study explored how community screening events contributed to the street economy and cultural exchanges that generated place-making power on the disappearing street.

Discussion of the Findings

At a glance, the versatile use of To Ga's “storefront” on Hung Fook Street, its community-building programme with attention to the kaifong, its social activism strategies, and the cultural innovations embodied in its operation recalled the approaches of Green Wave Art in the Yau Ma Tei district. While Green Wave Art was run as an art space, To Ga emphasised the conceptualisation of home – as its name suggested – and handiworks, from car repair, steel welding, and locksmithing to bakeries, which once sustained the district's local economy. In particular, Fixing Hong Kong, which offered free fixing services to residents (especially the elderly and the underprivileged) in the neighbourhood, was one of the core groups backing the operation of To Ga by engaging in “place-making” via “place-fixing” (Huang, 2018: 368). Despite sharing similar post-materialist aspirations, Green Wave Art and To Ga showcased their respective particularities based on their localities; in other words, local relations were played out differently between urban dwellers, their habitats, and ways of (making a) living as conditioned by the distinctive characteristics of each neighbourhood on a scale of buildings, streets, and districts. Awaiting its forced evacuation that would occur at any time, To Ga, like the few remaining residents and tenants on the same street, was haunted by a contingency of an end.

Against this backdrop, film screenings remained one of the most affordable bonding activities organised by To Ga regularly in the form of open and closed group events. Its closed group screenings included “Kids’ Theatre,” which played cartoon films for children in the neighbourhood during the summer holidays and a movie night that took place during the Hungry Ghost Festival, which in Hong Kong fell on the fourteenth day of the seventh lunar month. Although “Kids’ Theatre” ceased running after almost all the households with children had moved out, these activities in the past characterised To Ga's connection with the kaifong and its efforts to connect with all walks of life. In these instances, To Ga actively integrated existing members and newcomers in the neighbourhood, regardless of their age and ethnicity, into the community. Meanwhile, To Ga also invented its own “tradition,” in sociologist Anthony Gidden's term: without the need to further announce them, its members and “anyone who [knew] about it” watched local comedy films as an in-group leisure activity during the Hungry Ghost Festival every year (Anonymous 2, 2020). Traditions are, after all, reinvented by “each new generation” (Giddens, 1990: 37; Giddens, 2000: 40) – in this case, To Ga's self-identity as a “youthful” community member was habituated to a neighbourhood on the verge of disappearance, which – according to the pro-business logic of property developers – was nothing more than an ageing district listed on the bulldozer's agenda.

All these features remained salient in the community screening events organised by To Ga, reflecting the self-positioning of the To Ga community under constant threat of destruction and disappearance. Under these circumstances, To Ga's film screenings were, in any case, a means to “gather people” as well as a bridge of communication that offered an “entry point” to a subject matter (Anonymous 2, 2020). In a similar spirit, To Ga not only participated as a venue partner in the Hong Kong Social Movement Film Festival between 2015 and 2017, but it also partnered with local indie filmmakers, including Fredie Ho-lun Chan and Kong King-chu, who presented and discussed their films. For topical events, a sharing session was often arranged with relevant groups, if not the directors. In this regard, the spectatorship generated by public screenings was a point of intersection and a moment of transgression, where film audiences and filmmakers came to meet with the To Kwa Wan kaifong in the form of their first-person experiences, while the kaifong were invited to encounter other spaces and different worldviews in their habitual territory but beyond their everyday life networks and routines.

Contrary to Green Wave Art's emphatic avoidance of topics relating to the harsh realities faced by the kaifong (e.g. housing problems and cage homes), To Ga offered local and translocal perspectives in discussions covering diversified issues, from the ecological and political to land conflicts. For instance, at the Hong Kong Social Movement Film Festival, To Ga made a conscious selection of the films it wanted to host. In the 2015 edition, To Ga chose The Thing Next Door (Hubert, 2012), a documentary looking back at an anti-nuclear power plant protest in 1980s Germany, to highlight the formation of a resilient community and environmental concerns that were expected to speak to the To Kwa Wan residents. In the 2016 edition, a documentary on Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement, Misfit Utopia Next to the Public Toilet: One Night of 318 Occupation Movement (Taiwan Social Movement Visual Studio and Video Gang Production, 2014), was screened in response to the disqualification of elected lawmakers from the city's legislature that year. In the 2017 edition, the screening of the Polish documentary short House on Strike (Syrena Collective, 2016), which featured a civil disobedience movement against the surge in property and rental prices in Warsaw, was paired with a guided cultural tour of To Kwa Wan, with the goal of resonating the problems of gentrification and urban redevelopment between Hong Kong and Poland. In 2019, To Ga remarkably attracted over 100 viewers, its highest turnout, for the documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (Afineevsky, 2015). Likewise, the screening of the South Korean blockbuster film 1987: When the Day Comes (Jang, 2017) – which chronicled a series of incidents leading to the eruption of the nationwide June Democratic Struggle in 1987 and consequently the democratisation of South Korea – further revealed the interest in communal spectatorship in its representation of social activism, which could, in turn, be read as the spectator-kaifong's response to their own situated reality.

Implications

The sense of community that is communicated through the planning, organisation, and experience of community screenings corresponds to the broad conceptualisation of community as a “locality-based social unit” that is characterised by a geographic area as well as the “social life it contains” (Hyde and Chavis, 2008: 180). The diverse film events organised by To Ga provided different frames to understand the flexibility of public screenings and compatibility with its community-building campaign. For instance, alongside a rooftop renovation project in 2016, To Ga organised a film screening event on the rooftop of one of the tenement buildings as a get-together occasion for the kaifong to interact with each other while reintegrating a neglected open space into the local community. From the perspective of independent filmmakers, community screenings offered a platform for them to study audiences’ responses as well as an alternative space for non-commercial works, which would otherwise not be formally released or distributed, to circulate. While no fixed-price tickets were sold on most of these occasions, it was up to the viewers to make a donation of any amount. That being said, community screenings did not usually generate a generous income; at best, the donations were a token of appreciation to the filmmaker, the organiser, and/or the venue and equipment providers. In any case, To Ga demonstrated how community screenings served as a component of a community-building project and an attempt at creating an alternative “street economy,” despite that the group's very own presence was constantly challenged by the threat of the disappearance of the space that they had created.

Case Study III: HK Community Cinema

Overview

HK Community Cinema was founded in 2016 by a group of people who worked for film organisations, community concern groups, and non-governmental organisations, with an aim to promote non-mainstream films, resist censorship, and foster a film-watching culture in the community. The founding of HK Community Cinema was brought about by the core members’ early encounters with indie films in non-conventional screening venues – including the screening of On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing (Mak, 2012), a documentary about Hong Kong's indie music scene, at a local school, HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity – in addition to the phenomenal community-driven dissemination of Ten Years in 2016 (Anonymous 3, 2020). Whereas the operation of HK Community Cinema was very much limited beginning in 2020, this section will trace back to the operational logics and aspirations of the group during its formative and active years.

With an eye to the limitations of commercial circuits and the lack of a screening platform for indie filmmakers, HK Community Cinema sought alternative venues by innovating the use of public spaces (e.g. on the streets) and cooperating with like-minded venue partners (vis-a-vis the high rental pressure faced by commercial theatres, as for many retail businesses, in Hong Kong). In September 2016, the group kicked off its first community screening space by showing the Ukraine–UK–US coproduction documentary Winter on Fire in a covered open space. The film, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2015, recounted the pro-democracy protests in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 that ultimately led to the re-election of the government. Demonstrating its translocal pathway and social significance, the same film was widely circulated and discussed around the world following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022; prior to that, the film was publicly screened, often in a “guerrilla” mode, across Hong Kong over the course of the Anti-ELAB Movement.

In addition to the use of public spaces, some of the early screening venues mobilised by HK Community Cinema included cafés (e.g. TC2), art spaces (e.g. the aforementioned Green Wave Art), and office spaces (e.g. Ying E Chi, an independent film organisation, and InMediaHK.net, an independent online media platform). In 2020, the group partnered with Form Society in Sham Shui Po, the Mobile Co-learning Classroom in Wan Chai, and Bleak House Books in San Po Kong to cover accessible meeting points across Hong Kong. One key consensus between HK Community Cinema and its venue partners was that the group enjoyed the autonomy of film programming. From 2016 to 2020, the group accumulated a diversified profile from the multilanguage films they curated from local, regional, and global cinemas – ranging from animation and documentaries to feature films of different genres – which addressed a broad scope of subject matters. This case study aimed to demonstrate the making of an alternative public sphere and the maintenance of a community's economy through the organisation-participation of community screenings.

Discussion of the Findings

By calling themselves a “cinema circuit” (as in their name in Cantonese), the group aimed to adopt regularity in their screening agenda, not just to resemble the practice of commercial circuits, but also to foster a film-viewing habit in the community in the long run. With this in mind, HK Community Cinema devised a monthly schedule that showed one film at three different locations during the first weekend of every month. In the hope of creating a sustainable economy within the community circuit, a fee mechanism was set up. Except when there was a special request from the filmmaker, the participants were free to make any contribution, with the suggested amount being HKD 40 – nearly half the reported movie ticket price (around HKD 75) on average between 2015 and 2017 (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, 2018). Unlike the commercial distribution network, HK Community Cinema had a transparent breakdown between all the collaborators: the director received 50 per cent of the total revenue generated; the venue shared 30 per cent; and the remaining 20 per cent was used for the group's basic operating expenses. These ratios, moreover, revealed HK Community Cinema's attempt to reverse mainstream market logic by trading its own profits for credits to the creators and event partners. While audience sizes varied from a handful to a few hundred, the turnover of the parties involved not just fluctuated but was also unpredictable – a member of HK Community Cinema described this inevitable situation as sometimes “embarrassing” (Anonymous 3, 2020). This, likewise, revealed that the community circuit was run on a mutual gain concept, where the idea of “gain” was not necessarily measured by monetary value but could be interpreted in the form of digital and real-life visibility, cognitive experiences, visitors’ flow, knowledge exchange, and belonging to a community, among others. In other words, the post-materialist operation model largely eliminated the “winner-take-all” situation, which contrasted with the labour market of the Hong Kong film industry (Szeto and Chen, 2013). While the low “cost” of community screenings helped to keep “losses,” if any, to a minimum, in many aspects of its operation, HK Community Cinema demonstrated creative possibilities and their impacts. This “guerrilla” mode of operation was, most of all, epitomised by the fact that essential audio-visual equipment, such as the projector and speakers, was mostly borrowed and stored at changing locations.

In terms of programme design, HK Community Cinema exhibited its creativity, knowledge mobilisation initiatives, and translocal concerns about issues related to justice, equity, and inclusivity by addressing topics not limited to feminism, LGBTQ+, social justice, environmentalism, and rights movements through the curation of independent and commercial film productions, both local and those from abroad. To name a few, the screening of the scenic documentary Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (Chi, 2013) at a primary school in August 2017 raised concerns over local activists jailed for protesting against the Northeast New Territories development plans in 2014 (Cheung, 2017). That same year, in response to the ousting of elected lawmakers, the group showed the oft-screened Ten Years, which was known for its dystopian depiction of Hong Kong's future, and Yellowing, a documentary on the Umbrella Movement (Cheung, 2017). From June 2019 until the outbreak of the pandemic, the group curated a number of documentaries, using screening practices to respond to social sentiments and events. For instance, in September and October 2019, the group thematised two series, namely, “Hong Kong, add oil [fight on]” and “Resilience,” where Winter on Fire, The Edge of Night (Chiang, 2018), Hand in Hand (Yen and Chuang, 2010), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Loach, 2006), and the South Korean blockbuster films A Taxi Driver (Jang, 2017) and 1987: When the Day Comes were, respectively, screened. Just as the group changed their usual screening rhythm (from one film per month on the first weekend of the month to six films in two months on weekdays at different locations), they exhibited an adaptive and responsive approach to show solidarity with their target audience by presenting an ensemble of films that echoed the city's social movements with those in Ukraine, Taiwan, Ireland, and South Korea.

Implications

In sum, during the time when it was active (i.e. before the COVID-19 pandemic), HK Community Cinema was characterised by its attention to current affairs, outspoken stance, and reactive actions, which were expressed in not just film curation, but also the space they opened up for images, ideas, opinions, and people to flow through. Moreover, the group emphasised that copyrights were always cleared before any showing of the films in public – as one of their primary operating logics. In fact, respect for copyrights in acknowledgement of the creative energy generated and the film workers’ labour was shared by all the public screening organisers that I interviewed between 2019 and 2020. Rather than simply showing moving images to a crowd, all these community screening organisers guided their participants in understanding the motivation behind the community cinema circuit. Their operating logics were underlined by their cultural strategies to resist the monopoly of existing cinema chains determining the market's taste (e.g. what films will [not] become available), to unsettle the unequal power relationship imposed on the distributors and filmmakers of different “status” by commercial circuits, and to escape from gentrification and adherence to a sales-based business model in Hong Kong's high-rent environment.

Different from Green Wave Art and To Ga's primary focus on the kaifong and their respective districts, HK Community Cinema was remotely run by its core members without a fixed physical base, and its audience constituted film viewers, passers-by, the kaifong, venue providers, and any other citizens – on the surface, the group enjoyed fluid mobility by avoiding the cost of a “storefront” and the potential threat of removal. In practice, HK Community Cinema depended on other physical hubs (such as Green Wave Art) for their screenings to take place, from providing electricity for the audio-visual appliances and erecting the screens (whatever they were made of) to designating an area for participants to show up for the screening activities.

Conclusion

The three community screening organisers, as mentioned, were not the only ones in Hong Kong, but each developed its own modes and programming motifs with respect to the transforming social, political, and economic landscapes between 2014 and 2020. These eventful years compelled the population to rethink the idea of territory, existing urban imaginary, and the relationship between subjectivity and identity – it was a time when “Hong Kong [was] undergoing a disorienting transition from the relatively anticipated time to the ‘disjointed time’” (Ip, 2020: 104), and “the various constructions of ‘Hong Kong’ [showed] the inevitable linkage between culture and history, as well as history and identity” (C. Chan, 2022: 167). Moreover, with awareness of the diverse typographies and connotations of the term “participation,” it should be noted that the communal space envisioned in the process, or in anthropologist Andrea Cornwall's words, “space people create for themselves,” tended to “consist of people who [came] together because they [had] something in common” (2008: 275). Under these circumstances, the three case studies were worth documenting, as they occupied and bore witness to the disappearing spaces in the city and the continuous place-making efforts in the community: both the gallery space of Green Wave Art and the “storefront” of the House of To Kwa Wan Stories were closed down in 2019 and 2021, respectively; with the social distancing measures during the pandemic and the authorities’ control over film screenings, HK Community Cinema also ceased operating in mid-2020.

As a concluding remark, the findings of the three case studies suggested that there was no “best practice” – upon the domination of neoliberal practices in Hong Kong, the multiple roles played by all these screening organisers, venue partners, locally oriented businesses, and community groups and their mutual presence were vital to increasing their chance of survival through a locally developed and, hopefully, self-sustainable network. At this point, it should be noted that most of these community screening organisers, partners, and supporters (not limited to the three detailed case studies) shared ethical concerns for locally oriented businesses, artists, craftspeople, and community members. They were aware of the economic considerations in the capitalist society, while looking for alternative narratives and practices to defy market logic and maintain the autonomy of creation and expression. With the creative use of space and by participating in an alternative economy, community screenings gave rise to an urban cultural space that emphasised democratic expression, topographical belonging, and resistance against a neoliberal framework normalised by the mainstream discourse of the city. Although the community screening trend in Hong Kong did not pick up the same momentum following the COVID-19 pandemic, the enactment of the National Security Law in 2020, and the amendment of the Film Censorship Ordinance in 2021, the community-prompted film dissemination practice has been adopted by Hong Kong immigrants in their newfound home(s) overseas.

Although spectatorship was not the primary focus of this article, the phenomenal nature and the communal characteristic of community screening that took root in Hong Kong during the first two decades of the postmillennial era had generated a form of spectatorship that was diverse, dispersed, and visible, offering an alternative to the conventional film-going experience dominated by commercial circuit. I am fully aware of the difference in terms of the mode as well as the goal of distribution between community screening and commercial circulation in the context of Hong Kong; meanwhile, since the early 2020s the overseas trajectory of small- or mid-budget films from/about Hong Kong, regardless of their mode of production, demonstrated the intake of experience from the community screening practice in pre-pandemic Hong Kong – by targeting diasporic audience, ensuring seat occupancy through a number of strategies such as cinema rental, and co-organizing screenings with local groups (e.g. community organization and fan club). It is worth noting that some films (e.g. the protest-themed documentaries) chose to partake in the overseas distribution route at the outset owing to the setbacks and the potential risks they faced domestically. Other films – mostly genre films – aimed to target a wider audience on all fronts and were compelled to travel abroad following their success in the domestic market. Regarding their distribution outside Hong Kong during the early 2020s, the protest-themed documentaries often resorted to community-based screenings that were organised by way of ticket prebooking and venue rental, while genre films were usually marked (and marketed) by distribution companies for formal theatrical release. Despite the differences between these films in terms of genre, subject matter, and audience demographics, the overseas dissemination of these cultural products from Hong Kong cinema as a whole constituted a picture of connections and contradictions in the post-2019, post-pandemic cultural landscape. On the one hand, the appearance made by certain films signified the whatnot in Hong Kong (where the making of these films was inspired but their circulation was not necessarily supported for various reasons) and the potentiality of translocal circulation (which made the overseas screening of these films possible). On the other hand, diasporic audiences were eager to stay in sync with their Hong Kong counterparts by observing or being absorbed into, the spotlight garnered by popular films such as The Sparring Partner, Table for Six, and A Guilty Conscience on their new home ground. The 2022 comedy Table for Six gained more than HKD 77 million, ranking fourth among the highest-grossing films of the year (Wong, 2023b), and the courtroom drama A Guilty Conscience received HKD 115.06 million, making it the highest-grossing film of 2023 in Hong Kong, in addition to being the first local film to reach the 100 million mark in the domestic box office (Wong, 2024). Besides their box office success in Hong Kong, both films performed equally well in Mainland China, while garnering curiosity from overseas diasporic audiences in Canada and the US (Wong, 2023a); however, a 40 per cent decrease was recorded in Hong Kong's box office during the Christmas season in 2023: over the same period, box office revenues captured HKD 19.6 million in 2023 vis-a-vis HKD 32.8 million in 2022 (Heung, 2023). In fact, the trajectories of these films as well as the ways they were received tell of not just the paradigmatic shift in, but also its impacts on the cultural and social landscape, at times connecting and, at times, disconnecting the audience in and outside of Hong Kong.

Although what was thought to be a box office comeback in Hong Kong in 2022 seemed to have faded away by the end of 2023, beneath these fluctuations, filmmaking practices and film-viewing habits were still subject to change with regard to the perimeters and unsettling conditions installed by the still-volatile cultural and social environment in 2023. However, the circulation of Hong Kong films in both domestic and overseas contexts should not be categorised as a binary speculation of being a hit or a flop in Hong Kong cinema in the post-2019, post-pandemic era. Admittedly, what is uncanny about this time is the persistence of uncertainty and anxiety, on the one hand, and the attempt to locate, if not invent, a silver lining, on the other hand. As a case in point, mass media popularised the term “siu joeng ceon” (in Jyutping Cantonese; 小陽春), literally meaning “little springtime,” after sighting the relatively promising box office performances of several locally produced films at the end of 2022 (AM730, 2023; Hung, 2022; InMedia.Net, 2023; Kwan, 2023; Lee, 2022; Wen Wei Po, 2022; Yim, 2023). In the context of the Chinese almanac, siu joeng ceon signifies warm weather in late autumn before the arrival of winter; in other words, a sense of temporariness is inscribed. Considering the use of the term in mass media, a discrepancy of views is also noteworthy: whereas the media tended to cite Warriors of Future (Ng, 2022), The Sparring Partner, and Table for Six as examples, film critics (e.g. Cheng Ching-hang) and filmmakers (e.g. Ann Hui, Ho Cheuk Tin) expressed their disagreement over such short-term readings of the film industry in interviews (AM730, 2023; Hung, 2022).

With awareness of the reservations expressed by veteran film critics and filmmakers towards any over-optimistic readings of the film industry, it is clear that the speculative picture, though potentially temporary, illustrated by media and social media narratives is associated with and has simultaneously injected a visual spectacularity into film dissemination. It is important to bear in mind the market share occupied by Hong Kong-made films at the domestic box office has long been on decline since the mid-1990s, with the year 1997 as a turning point where the revenue of imported films surpassed that of local productions ever since (Bordwell, 2011[2000]: 189). As I have argued elsewhere, there have been moments in recent years where the act of film viewing was performative and spectacularised (Wu, 2023). Despite the contradictions that have been discussed in this paper, the overseas trajectories of selected Hong Kong films have admittedly brought visuality to a diasporic spectatorship-in-the-making outside Hong Kong. As of the time of writing this conclusion, netizens have called for a global re-screening of Ten Years in 2025 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its phenomenal circulation, as well as the planned schedule to show the classic Hong Kong mahjong-themed comedy Fai Choi Spirit (To and Wai, 2002) during the Lunar New Year in multiple cities in the UK (Haven Productions, 2024). The community screening model continues to demonstrate an alternate route for cultural traffic by reinventing itself and transforming screen cultures and cultural practices through translocal film circulation and community building.