Re-orientating Hesitantly: Approaching the Entangled Temporalities of Cinema, Dementia, and Hong Kong From a Decolonial Viewpoint

In Ann Hui’s Summer Snow (1995, Hong Kong), the elderly Lin Sun, the patriarch of an “everyday” Hong Kong family, lives with Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout the film, despite the constant temporal and spatial disorientation that Lin Sun faces, the people around him never really renounce him for his out-of-place-ness and out-of-time-ness but, rather, re-orientate themselves in relation to his worldview and changing sense of identification. Focussing on the interpersonal interactions between the person living with dementia and the person not living with dementia as encompassed by the social realist aesthetics in Hui’s film, the chapter advocates for a hesitant approach towards the experiences of dementia. The chapter suggests that to hesitate is to unfurl time and to allow for the simultaneous occupation of multiple positions on a temporal plane. In highlighting the constant temporal negotiations and refusing to pin any character, or the audience members, into a fixed temporal regime, films about dementia, this chapter argues, offer and encourage a decolonial worldview that allows us to live with dementia without evaluating one’s life course to the homogeneity of clock time.