The Touch of Water Beyond the Dream and the Affective Politics of Hong Kong after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement

This paper illustrates the possible connections and resonations between the romance film Beyond the Dream (2019, dir. Kiwi Chow) and the affective politics of Hong Kong after the Anti- Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) Movement. The film was released at the moment that the movement had been suppressed by the government by imposing the National Security Law. However, while the film received support from the pro-activist camp which is known as "Yellow Circle," and achieved success at the box office, the film features a generic formula of romance with no explicit thematic, narrative or semiotics connection to current politics. Taking the lens of sensational cinema studies, this paper investigates the film in three aspects: genre, haptic image and bodily sensations, all of which reveal the affective mechanism of the cinematic medium that evokes the audience's sensory experience of the movement through an embodied spectatorship.