Accomplishments

Communication PhD student wins outstanding paper award for analysing McDull film series

Enoch Tam, Year 1 PhD student of the School of Communication, won an outstanding paper award at a symposium for postgraduate students of five communication schools in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, from 4 to 5 July. His paper “Post-Nostalgic Capitalist City: Anatomy of Temporalities and Spatialities in McDull Series” received commendation in the film art and industry category.

Enoch said his paper borrowed the notion of “post-nostalgia” to analyse different arrangements of temporalities and spatialities in the McDull film series. He explained that the concept of post-nostalgia was derived from the nostalgic films that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, directors used nostalgic elements to assuage anxiety related to the uncertainty of the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Yet in the McDull series, the situation the directors faced changed: the myth of the never-fail capitalist city burst. Through different arrangements of time and space, the series provided an alternative cultural imagination that enabled a rethinking of the current situation in Hong Kong.

“It is a topic unexplored by local and international film scholars. I am glad that I had the opportunity to present a paper on McDull at a communication conference and promote Hong Kong’s culture and a local film to fellow researchers in the Chinese-speaking community. I wish to thank my supervisor Professor Emilie Yeh for encouraging me to write a paper on McDull,” said Enoch.

The conference was organised by the School of Communication and Journalism of Peking University, Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication, the School of Journalism and Communication of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the School of Communication of HKBU and the College of Communication of National Chengchi University.

	Enoch Tam was presented with an outstanding paper award