This research examines how the Hong Kong film industry between 2022 and 2026 has navigated a tightened regulatory environment in the city. Situated within critical media industry studies, censorship theories, and Bourdieu’s field theories as analytical lens, it approaches Hong Kong cinema as a politically charged site of cultural production where power, agency, and meaning are continuously negotiated.
Treating censorship as both a repressive and productive force, the study interrogates how institutional constraints shape creative agency, and how meaning is reconfigured within a field marked by shifting relations and dynamics between state power and cultural producers. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital as analytical lenses, it rethinks how autonomy, capital, and censorship interact in structuring Hong Kong’s cinematic field.
Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed-methods design that combines textual analysis, surveys, and interviews with above- and below-the-line film workers. This approach remains rare in Hong Kong cinema scholarship, which tends to focus either on film text analysis or media policy studies. By triangulating findings across different methods, it provides a more comprehensive picture of how censorship operates as a regulatory, creative, and strategic force across the filmmaking process.
Ultimately, this research also aims to find out how western theoretical models of censorship, field, and critical media industry studies can be adapted or expanded to account for the specific socio-political and cultural context of Hong Kong cinema, and what new modes of cinematic expression, circulation and cultural memory are emerging under these conditions.