Reflecting on Cinemata Currents 2025: Stories in Motion, Conversations Across Bordersqas
By Jen Tarnate on 18
From June 2 to 8, 2025, Cinemata Currents brought together filmmakers, activists, educators, and audiences from Southeast Asia and beyond in a hybrid film festival rooted in storytelling, solidarity, and civic space.
Guided by the theme “Defending Civic Spaces through Minor Cinemas in Southeast Asia,” the festival showcased over 20 films across four thematic programs. More than a screening event, Cinemata Currents unfolded as a process of co-creation and reflection—an invitation to listen, respond, and reimagine.
Organized by Cinemata, EngageMedia’s open-source community video platform for social issue films in the Asia-Pacific, the week-long film festival featured scheduled online screenings with real-time interactive chat through the dedicated festival site, simultaneous in-person watch parties, live filmmaker talkbacks, and interactive virtual workshops. The co-viewing format allowed participants to engage with each other during the screenings, recreating the feeling of watching films together in a shared space. It became a platform for regional solidarity and collective imagination.
Across online and onsite events, the festival engaged over 400 viewers in the Asia-Pacific, with watch parties held in five countries and co-organized with 10 communities and independent film spaces in Southeast Asia. A roundtable discussion and two virtual workshops brought together around 70 participants in total, deepening conversations on participatory documentation, Indigenous storytelling, and community-led cinema.
Curating Minor Cinemas
The festival film program was curated by the inaugural batch of the Cinemata Community Curators Residency Program, film programmer, scholar and critic Patrick F. Campos (Philippines) and filmmaker and human rights campaigner Aghniadi (Indonesia). The four film programs focused on:
1. Displacement and Countermovement: Stories from the frontlines of exile, migration, and people navigating borders, highlighting how displaced communities remake civic spaces across fractured geographies.
2. 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.
3. Minority Counterpublics: Films reclaiming language, identity, and cultural memory, challenging exclusion and dominant narratives that suppress difference.
4. Indigeneity and Sovereignty: Powerful works by and about Indigenous communities resisting dispossession, foregrounding ancestral knowledge, land, and cosmology.
Patrick and Aghniadi emphasized the conceptual foundation of the festival: minor cinema as an active reimagination of dominant narratives. Rather than simply opposing the “major,” the curation aimed to dissolve binaries altogether.
Read the full Cinemata Currents 2025 Curatorial Notes here. Missed the festival? A selection of films is still available on the Cinemata Currents 2025 site.
Watch Parties as Civic Spaces
To complement the online screenings, Cinemata Currents 2025 partnered with 10 grassroots collectives and film hubs to host in-person watch parties in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, Malang, and Dili. These gatherings turned virtual screenings into grounded civic spaces of dialogue, reflection, and care.
In Chiang Mai, FRAME Film Club shared that their watch party ran until 2:30 a.m., as audiences shared stories of queerness, statelessness, and gender-based violence based on their local context and lived experience. They also shared that audiences found delight in Two Girls Against the Rain, a short film from Cambodia, and Lao Dance, as noted by one organizer, “People are used to seeing queer struggle. It was refreshing to see queer joy represented in films”.
An audience member at ME GOODY in Bangkok shared how the Thai film The Purple Kingdom resonated with him as a Burmese viewer, reflecting the realities of enforced disappearances in his own country. Meanwhile in Jakarta, Penabulu Foundation held a post-screening reflection connecting films like Atohan, a Philippine documentary on Indigenous land struggle, to similar issues in Indonesia. “The films became a mirror,” one participant shared, surfacing themes of care work, extractive economies, and ancestral land dispossession.
Vietnam National University’s Cinema Club hosted a screening and discussion on How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi, sparking rich dialogue on sound, memory, and Indigenous identity. The event inspired aspirations to organize a Southeast Asian film week spotlighting underrepresented regional voices.
In Malang, QLC Malang and Raja Bioskop engaged audiences through screenings and post-film games, leading to spontaneous conversations on feminism, identity, and queer history.
These shared moments across countries and contexts affirmed the role of cinema not only as a reflection of lived realities, but as a spark for civic imagination and cross-border solidarity.
Image from Vietnam National University’s Cinema Club
Watch Party Partners:
Indonesia:
Thailand:
Timor – Leste:
- Land Coalition members
Philippines:
Vietnam:
- Cinema Club – Vietnam National University
Workshops as Healing and Resistance
Beyond screenings and talkbacks, Cinemata Currents 2025 hosted a roundtable discussion and two interactive online workshops designed to bring the festival’s themes into grounded practice. These sessions created space for exchange, capacity-building, and critical reflection, especially for communities and practitioners working on the frontlines of justice, healing, and narrative change.
Nurturing Minor Cinemas and Counterpublics: The Power of Independent Film Spaces
Anti-Archive (Cambodia), Kinoise PH, Hanoi Grapevine’s Chùm Nho Cinema (Vietnam), and independent programmer Phoebe Pua(Singapore) came together to reflect on how microcinemas and informal film circuits foster civic dialogue and cultural resistance in the region. Panelists emphasized that minor cinema is not just defined by its subjects but also by its structures—collectives and platforms operating at the edges of dominant industry pipelines, grounded in care, community, and collaboration.
The conversation highlighted how minor cinema is not just about making films that tell stories from the margins, but also about creating alternative platforms, sustaining independent spaces, and reshaping who gets to tell stories, and for whom.
Watch the roundtable discussion here.
‘Nurturing Minor Cinemas and Counterpublics: The Power of Independent Film Spaces’
Empowering Survivor Stories: Participatory Documentation across Asia
Led by Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR) in partnership with Duay Jai Group from Thailand and Suriya Women’s Development Centre from Sri Lanka, this virtual workshop introduced Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods adapted for use in Asian context, like body mapping and river of life. Attendees from diverse backgrounds beyond the organizations’ usual networks reimagined these tools not just as healing practices, but also as storyboarding techniques that filmmakers and educators could apply to their work.
The session encouraged reflection on how to center survivor agency in storytelling, avoid re-traumatization, and create spaces of safety. One participant shared how drawing and storytelling in breakout groups allowed them to open up, despite not knowing the other participants. Facilitators echoed that the goal was never to extract stories, but to co-create meaning with care and consent.
Inspired by the experience, AJAR plans to adapt these methods for future workshops by anchoring them around specific human rights issues in the region, using breakout groups as spaces for collective insight and response.
AJAR and partners work to empower victims, support human rights defenders, and challenge impunity by fostering accountable, resilient societies in the Asia-Pacific. Through tools like participatory documentation, AJAR helps survivors, including indigenous and ethnic communities, reclaim their narratives and advocate for justice and lasting peace.
Access AJAR’s Unlearning Impunity manual resources here:
- Mosaic: A Manual for Rebuilding Lives and Communities After Torture – combines human rights, legal, and psychosocial tools, building on earlier resources like Stone & Flower, to help empower survivors and strengthen state accountability in countries such as Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.
- River of life method, is part of Module 10 where participants are guided to create a holistic view of themselves as persons, and empowered by drawing a “timeline” of their own lives and having the experiences depicted acknowledged by others.
- Body mapping method, is part of Module 11, Mapping Torture, where participants are guided to draw a silhouette of their bodies, that can show signs of what a person is experiencing not just physically but also mentally and emotionally.
- Body Mapping for Advocacy: A Toolkit – originally developed by activist Shirley Gunn, who shared AJAR the knowledge of this particular method for the collection and dissemination of victims’ narratives, and further adapted for use in Northern Myanmar and Deep South of Thailand.
Indigenous Storytelling in Action
In a session led by East West Management Institute – Open Development Initiative (EWMI–ODI) and Knowledge for Development Foundation (K4D), participants explored storytelling rooted in the Asian Framework on Indigenous Knowledge and Data Sovereignty(IKDS). Facilitators emphasized co-creating narratives with Indigenous communities, honoring their epistemologies, rights, and rhythms.
The session prompted deeper questions on positionality and authorship. “I thought I was tending to the minor,” one attendee reflected, “but I realized I was still operating within the major.” This insight captured a key tension: how even well-meaning interventions can reproduce dominant dynamics without self-awareness. One Filipino filmmaker expressed her intention to apply the methods in a documentary on Indigenous communities that she will be producing soon.
Access EWMI-ODI’s Women Storytelling manual here, created to help Indigenous women document their knowledge from a woman’s perspective. Through visual and narrative tools, it affirms the value of their cultural practices and supports their rights to self-determination, while making this knowledge accessible to their communities.
Watch the full workshop recording here.
These workshops reinforced the festival’s belief that storytelling is not just about representation but about process, care, and the right to narrate one’s own experience. Together, they offered frameworks for ethical, participatory, and transformative storytelling across the region. Whether you’re a filmmaker, educator, organizer, or student, feel free to integrate them into your own contexts and communities.
Thank You to Our Partners
Cinemata Currents 2025 would not have been possible without the generosity, creativity, and commitment of our community. We extend our heartfelt thanks to all our watch party organizers, workshop facilitators, talkback session guests, curators, and regional collaborators—as well as our media partners and supporters—for making this festival a collective effort rooted in care, courage, and collaboration.
What’s Next?
Since the festival wrapped, communities and film initiatives have reached out to host follow-up screenings and extend conversations. To support this, we’re preparing the Cinemata Currents Guidebook, featuring:
- A festival recap and key learnings
- Case studies from organizers and partners
- Facilitator tools and suggested formats
Our goal is to make Cinemata Currents a replicable model—one that lives beyond the organizers and serves movements in the Asia-Pacific. Stay tuned! The downloadable guidebook will be published here soon.
For partnerships and collaboration inquiries, feel free to email us at [email protected] and [email protected]