5201314: XXXX XXXX (Fourth Cut)

Thursday, March 12, 12:05 pm - 12:35 pm
Directed/Produced by Winnie W. C. Lai
2024. United States. 19 min.
Country/Region Featured: Hong Kong | Languages: Cantonese

In-person Q&A with Director Winnie W. C. Lai (Dartmouth University)

5201314: XXXX XXXX is an ethnographic video essay that examines emergent practices of self-censorship in Hong Kong following the 2019 pro-democracy movement and the subsequent transformation of its political and legal environment. The eight Xs signify the erasure of eight Cantonese words from a protest slogan, while “5201314” operates as a layered sonic cipher: in Cantonese, it closely echoes a line from the banned anthem “Glory to Hong Kong”; in Mandarin, it resonates with the phrase “I love you forever.” This dual articulation encapsulates the affective intensity of protest attachments to the city.

Situated within Hong Kong’s “semi-authoritarian” condition (Tai 2020) and its reconfigured “lawscape” (LaBelle 2021), the film explores how sonic and vocal expression has become newly politicized. Through field recordings and interviews initiated at the onset of the protests, it traces how “situated listening” (Feld 2015) operates as an affectively charged process shaped by power, territoriality, and the maintenance of “bodies politic” (Protevi 2009). Conceptualizing this dynamic as political aurality, the project examines how listening mediates the material and energetic flows of governance and resistance. Combining a written paper with a 19-minute film, the work advances ethnographic documentary as a multimodal, decolonial archive that preserves
affective histories otherwise at risk of erasure in Hong Kong’s censored present.

East & Inner Asia, Hong Kong