Paper short abstract:

The analysis of a 5-years dreams and scriptwriting ethnographic laboratory among local filmmakers engaged in the 2014-2019 Hong Kong protests. Tracing the appearance of affects and communitas among activists, I witness the emergence of audiovisual practices of resistance, from dreams to shared myth.

Paper long abstract:

Between 2014 and 2019, the youth of Hong Kong went through a political coming-of-age by organizing and participating in many collective actions of protest. This ethnographic account investigates the emergence, experience and results of collective rituals of resistance in the Hong Kong youth’s rite of passage towards a collective political maturity. Specifically, it aims to engage with the shared emotions and the resulting sensorial vivid memories of young filmmakers taking to the streets and facing the police, the translation and creative processing of these memories into videos as participative creative media, and the percolation of their creative acts throughout the community and society at large.

How will participating in impressive and politically charged events reappear in the informants’ filmmaking practices, and how will they mediate them? I analyse people’s accounts and dreams of their protest experiences, engaging them in a participatory script writing laboratory for an ethno-fiction film. Through these encounters, this study is committed to describing and creatively rendering the emotional experiences of protesters as singularities within the multitude of the crowd, tracing them throughout different ethnographic moments.