As part of its ongoing commitment to support socially engaged filmmaking across the Asia-Pacific, Cinemata launches the inaugural edition of Cinemata Currents, a hybrid film festival spotlighting films from and about Southeast Asia that interrogate, reclaim, and reimagine civic spaces. While Cinemata continues to highlight stories from across the broader Asia-Pacific region, this festival edition centers on the urgent struggles, resistances, and solidarities emerging from Southeast Asian contexts.
This year’s edition is curated by Aghniadi from Indonesia and Patrick F. Campos from the Philippines, two film programmers and cultural workers whose practices lie at the intersection of cinema, advocacy, and regional solidarity. Both curators are part of the first batch of Cinemata Community Curators Residency Program that supports curators in developing regional film programs on human rights, environmental justice, and civic engagement.
Aghniadi is an Indonesian filmmaker and human rights campaigner whose work intersects human rights storytelling and grassroots activism. Patrick F. Campos is a film scholar, critic, and programmer based in the Philippines, whose research and curatorial practice engage with notions of national and regional cinema in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Together, their curatorial approaches bring depth and dimension to Cinemata Currents 2025, weaving translocal narratives of resistance, identity, and solidarity.
The curatorial notes that follow are written by the curators and presented here with minor edits.
The Virtual as a Space of Minor Resistance
In an era when civic spaces across the Asia-Pacific are systematically repressed—through state surveillance, digital authoritarianism, and the neoliberal privatization of public life—Cinemata Currents reconfigures a liberating alternative as a film festival: not as a substitute or a compromise, but as another route for minor cinema.
Turning away from the notion of the film festival as a space of culturati consumption and toward the utopian promise of the digital commons, grassroots organizing, artistic protests, and the ethics of sharing, Cinemata Currents simultaneously documents the contraction of public discourse while reimagining the virtual as a civic space of participative intervention.
Not bound by the limitations of topographies, this hybrid virtual platform emerges as an experiment in minor cinema. Drawing upon philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, the terms “virtual” and “minor” here go beyond just meaning digital or small-scale. These terms do not imply that the showcase is a lesser version of something larger. Rather, each signals a space of possibility where new ways of seeing, making, and connecting may emerge.
Virtuality refers to what could be, a space of potential that isn’t opposed to reality but exists alongside it, waiting to be realized. Minor cinema signifies moving-image practices that, in their innumerable, dispersed, fragmentary, imperfect, mutable, unstable, and disruptive nature, undercut suppressive and oppressive power structures by operating outside established norms, primarily through unconventional forms that project marginalized perspectives.
In this way, the festival’s virtuality is not merely a contingency of our digital epoch but a deliberate political strategy.
In the tradition of minor cinema’s challenge to hegemonic representational regimes, Cinemata Currents employs the internet’s intangible and elusive qualities—its ability to circumvent censorship and thrive on anonymity, its resistance to fixed borders, its capacity to assemble and amplify disparate and silenced voices. The digital format actualizes minor cinema’s characteristics: deterritorialized (through hyperlinked and multilingual interfaces), the personal politicized and vice versa (through the horizontal interfacing of artists and audiences and pockets of onsite screenings), and the enunciation collectivized (through hybrid and simultaneous exhibitions, publics, and conversations).
Film Programming as a Mode of Intervention
As an advocacy-driven initiative, Cinemata Currents does not just present films—it creates a participatory space where audiences, filmmakers, and advocates can actively engage with one another. Through interactive and community screenings, real-time discussions with civil society organizations, and a digital campaign, the festival aims to transform film programming into an act of shared meaning-making.
The festival highlights organized social movements as well as micro-resistances—the ways in which marginalized groups assert their presence in historic moments and daily life, whether through nongovernmental networking, community organizing, or documenting their lived experiences. However, rather than flattening these narratives into a single framework, Cinemata Currents emphasizes the nuances of diverse practices, places, and issues—understanding that while themes of displacement, marginalization, and erasure may resonate across regions, the specific conditions, responses, and stakes differ. By centering these complexities, the programs foster a deeper engagement with how civic spaces are contested, reclaimed, and reimagined across the Asia-Pacific. Central to this approach is Cinemata’s decades-long, extensive archive of thousands of audiovisual materials—a collection built collaboratively with a wide range of civil society actors in the region.
Through a constellation of curated screening sets, the festival illuminates the manifold ways in which minor cinemas articulate the lived experiences of those who exist at the peripheries of dominant power structures and majority populations, foregrounding the political tactics, cultural expressions, and theoretical reworldings represented in and enacted through moving-image practices and works. By fostering discussions with individuals whose lives connect with, intersect with, and are represented in the films, the festival acknowledges the multifaceted nature of images: simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the intervening act of movement and moviemaking.
Translocal Thematics of the Minor
Minor cinema invites binary comparisons but paradoxically aspires to being neither minority nor majority, neither margin nor center.
It speaks in a chorus of fractured tongues—echoes of regions and ethnic minorities dispersed across lands shaped not by choice but by history’s weight. The works are purposeful and contingent, trafficking beyond the hierarchies and values of art and industry.
This inaugural festival iteration is organized into four segments, each revealing a thematic praxis of the minor that frustrates the unquestioned status quo.
For what is power but erasure disguised as order?
Minority Counterpublics
The festival interrogates moving images as a site of de- and reterritorialization, where the margins do not plead for inclusion but instead dispute the center’s claim to universality and the myth of national cultural homogeneity. In this segment, films document not only acts of preservation but also the evolution of cultural practices that refuse the pressures of reductive categorizations, involuntary assimilation, and systemic exclusion.
Displacement and Countermovement
In a kind of inversion, films about displacement gain resonance when viewed from multiple locations. The online platform mirrors the condition of exile—present yet imprecisely located. Moreover, this segment captures the precarious situations of migrants, refugees, and those crisscrossing borders while focusing on solidarity networks and cultural acts that reconstitute civic spaces.
Indigeneity and Sovereignty
The films in this segment preserve and reactivate Indigenous knowledge against the logics of empire, capital, and military power. They explore land politics and environmental issues, positioning Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies as potent counter-discourses to extractive paradigms.
Feminist and Queer Subjectivities
In societies where LGBTQIA+ identities and feminist movements are criminalized or suppressed, minor cinema forges networks of care, traces vital new kinships, and offers resources for self-definition. This set unveils doubly marginalized subjects and celebrates them through luminous films in the interstices of personal suffering.
As these thematics demonstrate, speaking from the region’s diverse margins is not seeking assimilation but inhabiting multiplicity. For those deemed “minor,” cinema becomes both rupture and solace—a breath that disrupts silence and resonates in the spaces between. The personal and political dissolve into one another; the everyday reveals itself as insurgent.
Ultimately, minor cinema claims no dominion but unsettles. In its articulation lies reclamation—not merely of territory, but of presence. To witness, to be witnessed—not as Other, but as selves in flux—is a refusal to vanish, a refusal to be contained.
Cinemata Currents 2025 runs from June 5–8, with preview screenings starting June 2. We invite you to watch the films, join the talkback sessions, attend workshops, and be part of this regional dialogue on civic spaces, resistance, and solidarity.
Register now to join the screenings and receive festival updates:
Stay tuned for the full film lineup and workshop registration details. Additional information will be shared soon through upcoming posts. Watch out for updates on Cinemata’s social media channels: Facebook and Twitter/X.
