Interbeing: Affective Release and Kinship in The Last Dance

Abstract

Po • deijuk (Po • diyu or The Last Dance, Anselm Chan, 2024) became the highest-grossing Chinese-language film in the history of Hong Kong cinema as of December 7, 2024. The Last Dance’s popularity is attributable to its ability to address the anger and frustration accumulated during the COVID-19 pandemic (overtly) and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (A-ELAB) protests in 2019–20, two events that are considered the crystallization of the problematics of Hong Kong’s postcolonial governance. The way the film does so, I argue, is by reopening and rewriting networks of affective flows that have been blocked not only by the recent sociopolitical traumas but also by the interpersonal infrastructure that most Hong Kongers have failed to address. In this light, the film tests the limits of how we have been understanding contemporary Hong Kong cinema in juridico-judicial terms (coloniality-postcoloniality). Instead, it requires a renewed understanding of the interdependent relationships among human beings. In this article, I use Thích Nhất Hạnh’s concept of «interbeing» as a framework to rethink how such interdependent relationships and kinship could be understood. For Thích, each being is best understood as a point of convergence of all beings, and what we call an individuated being is already an «interbeing». For me, the concept of interbeing is helpful not only as a hermeneutic model but also to reimagine how Hong Kongers could move beyond the city’s oppressive postcolonial conditions by releasing them from their affective blockages and attachments.