Cinemata Currents 2025: A Hybrid Film Festival of Shared Viewing and Civic Imagination

As civic spaces across the Asia-Pacific face growing threats, Cinemata Currents offers a hybrid festival that brings together cinema and collective resistance—both online and in communities. Organized by Cinemata, a platform for human rights and environmental justice films, the festival runs from June 5 to 8, 2025, with previews from June 2 to 4.

The program features scheduled 90-minute film sets streamed regionally, followed by live talkbacks where audiences can engage with filmmakers through Q&A. Selected films that are not part of the scheduled live streams will also be available on-demand throughout the festival, allowing audiences to watch at their own pace.

Local partners across Asia-Pacific will host watch parties to deepen engagement through community screenings and conversations.

On June 7 and 8, virtual workshops led by regional partners will offer practical insights and dialogue tied to the festival’s themes. These workshops will be open to registered participants via Zoom.

The Cinemata Currents festival site will be launching soon, where audiences can access the full lineup, streaming links, talkback sessions, and workshop registration. Stay tuned!

Program Strands and Festival Screening Schedule

This year’s lineup centers on minor cinema—a mode of filmmaking that resists dominant narratives and centers voices often pushed to the margins. These films speak from and with the peripheries: fractured, intimate, powerful, and rooted in lived experience.

The festival is organized into four thematic program strands, each exploring different facets of minor cinema, and presented according to the screening schedule below:

Displacement and Countermovement
Stories from the frontlines of exile, migration, and people navigating borders, highlighting how displaced communities remake civic spaces across fractured geographies.

    • Screening: June 5, 6:30 PM UTC+7 (with live talkback)

Feminist and Queer Subjectivities
Luminous, layered films centering feminist and LGBTQIA+ lives, illuminating care, kinship, and resistance in societies where such identities are marginalized or erased.

    • Screening: June 6, 6:30 PM UTC+7 (with live talkback)

Minority Counterpublics
Films reclaiming language, identity, and cultural memory, challenging exclusion and dominant narratives that suppress difference.

    • Screening: June 7, 2:00 PM UTC+7 (with live talkback)

Indigeneity and Sovereignty
Powerful works by and about Indigenous communities resisting dispossession, foregrounding ancestral knowledge, land, and cosmology.

    • Screening: June 8, 4:00 PM UTC+7 (with live talkback) + Festival Closing

Preview Screenings
Select films from all four program strands will be available for early viewing on the Cinemata Currents festival site. These previews offer a glimpse into the themes explored in this year’s edition.

    • Dates: June 2–4, 7:30 PM UTC+7 (Monday to Wednesday)

Register now to join the online screenings: REGISTER HERE

Join Us

Cinemata Currents is not just about watching films. It’s about building civic connection through cinema. We invite filmmakers, organizers, and community members to take part in:

  • Online screenings and live talkback sessions
  • Local watch parties during the festival period
  • Virtual workshops and roundtable discussions

We also welcome community screenings after the festival duration if you’re unable to host a watch party on the scheduled dates. We’d love to support you in bringing these films to your audiences in meaningful ways.

For partnership inquiries, please contact Cinemata Currents Festival Director, Jen Tarnate, at [email protected], and cc [email protected].

Additional information will be shared soon through upcoming posts. Watch out for updates on Cinemata’s social media channels: Facebook and Twitter/X.