A cinema with feeling: Crises, sentiment, and the box office miracles in post-2019 Hong Kong

Highlighting the role of film viewers, this article examines two recent top-grossing Hong Kong films to investigate the emergence of an evocative space that empowers audiences to reimagine Hong Kong—a cultural subjectivity that has been fading amid the city’s socioeconomic transformations over recent decades. Within this space, public voices are given room to exist on the fringes of power, beyond the dominance and control of any particular class or party. I argue that ‘sentiment’ functions as a transient means of expression, and facilitates the formation of spontaneous, pluralistic communities composed of individuals who are free to engage with and respond to change in subtle and metaphorical ways, especially in contexts where voices and expressions are heavily censored or silenced. This study aims to offer an alternative perspective from the viewer’s perception, in order to complement the industrial approach which is increasingly limited in its explanatory power.