Victor Fan, “Interbeing: Affective Release and Kinship in The Last Dance,” Arbor – Ciencia Pensamiento y Cultura 202, no. 815, https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2026.815.3105.
Abstract:
Po • deijuk (Po • diyu or The Last Dance, Anselm Chan, 2024) became the highest-grossing Chinese-language film in Hong Kong cinema history on December 7, 2024. The Last Dance’s popularity can be attributed to its ability to address the (openly) accumulated anger and frustration during the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests against the proposed amendment to the Anti-Extradition Act (A-ELAB) in 2019 and 2020—two events widely seen as crystallizing the governance problems of postcolonial Hong Kong. I argue that the film addresses this by reopening and rewriting the networks of affective flows that have been blocked not only by recent sociopolitical traumas but also by an interpersonal infrastructure that most Hong Kongers have failed to navigate. From this perspective, the film explores the limitations of how we have been understanding Hong Kong cinema in legalistic terms (coloniality-postcoloniality). On the contrary, it demands a new understanding of the interdependent relationships between human beings. In this work, I use Thích Nhất Hạnh’s concept of “interbeing” as a framework for rethinking how interdependent relationships and kinship can be understood. For Thích, each being is best understood as a point of convergence for all beings, and what we consider an individual being is already an “interbeing.” For me, the concept of interbeing is useful not only as a hermeneutical model but also for reimagining how Hong Kongers can move beyond oppressive postcolonial conditions by freeing themselves from their affective blocks and attachments.