Hong Kong independent political documentary under the regulating dispositif: Inside the Red Brick Wall and beyond

Abstract

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 () 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.