Diving into the Sea: Submerged Perspectives and Trans-scale Wastewater

The freshwater that flows through the pipeline gives Hong Kong, which is naturally water-stressed, the appearance of abundance. However, Hong Kong’s water crisis necessitates a new effective response to the circulating space in the city, especially given how closely its urban sphere is linked to its surrounding water ecosystem. Hong Kong film Public Toilet confronts the environmental disconnection issue by drawing on the submerged perspectives within a hydrocommon habitat by emphasizing eco-cosmopolitanism. As a boundary between nature and culture, the toilet becomes a site to examine how people live with wastewater in Asian contexts. Public Toilet chooses to see how the city has turned to ties with seemingly distant dirt material, emphasizing the interconnected relationships between humans and non-humans over urban fear. This paper contends that visions of alternative urban life are enunciated through evoking our ecological awareness in the film. On the one hand, the film highlights the planetary perspective by creating cross-scale connections between toilets and the vast ocean. On the other hand, through collective action, the film envisions the potential eco-cosmopolitanism that acknowledges group differences in class, race, and gender, simultaneously questioning the framework of the We Narrative in the Anthropocene.