The ‘We’ in two pairs of documentaries about protests by The 70’s Biweekly syndicate and the 2019 Hong Kong Documentary Workers

Abstract

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.