Borrowed Time:Performance of Failure and Interbeing

Choy Ji’s (Cai Jie) Renhai tongyou 人海同遊 (Borrowed Time, 2024) is one of the three independent films since 2018 that address cross-border family relationships from the perspective of protagonists who constantly need to negotiate their liminality between Hong Kong and the mainland. This article argues that the film operates on a parapractic poetics: it represents a father’s failure to fulfill his paternal role by abandoning his mainland partner and daughter and in turn performs the larger society’s failure to care for these abandoned family members. In Renhai tongyou, however, Choy Ji goes beyond an attempt to achieve mutual understanding between the spectators and these abandoned wives and children. The film uses the Buddhist framework of interbeing to suggest a pathway for the spectators to become mindful of these people’s suffering as theirs, thus promoting both empathy and compassion.