Cultivating memory of the future: The meaning of collective watching Ten Years in 2025 Australia

This article examines the Hong Kong speculative fiction anthology film Ten Years (2015) as a social event constituted through its collective consumption. Focusing on a public screening organised by a Hong Kong diasporic collective in Melbourne in November 2025—the very year imagined in the film—it asks what it means to encounter a speculative future from within its projected temporal horizon. Moving beyond representational critique, the analysis shifts to the politics of viewing, arguing that the film’s political force is generated not only through narrative but through practices of circulation, spectatorship, and remembrance. This article draws on an autoethnographic account of the screening and conceptualises shared viewing as a form of everyday political agency through which diasporic Hong Kongers negotiate identity and political subjectivity under conditions of displacement and repression. It engages theories of collective memory, group formation, and nostalgia, showing how an otherwise ordinary screening becomes a ritualised moment of communal meaning-making. In this process, Ten Years operates not merely as representation, but as a lived cultural practice through which a fragmented diaspora actively produces and sustains Hong Kong identity in the present.