Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network Symposium: “Archives, Activism, Aesthetics” Maohui Deng (University of Manchester) ‘Wandering Across Time: Pasts and the Present in Singapore Cinema’ This presentation argues that the trope of wandering in films about dementia offers the potential for a nuanced articulation of issues surrounding memory in relation to cinema’s capacity to shape national narratives. Specifically, I will use Boo Junfeng’s 2015 short film Parting to explore the ways in which Singapore cinema uses the trope of the person living with dementia wandering to enter and traverse the nation’s discursive sphere of history and historiography. Focusing on the temporal collision/coalescence experienced by the person living with dementia, I first explore the ways in which wandering blurs the line between the past and the present in Parting, arguing that in traversing space, the person living with dementia is also traversing time. Then, I suggest that the case of people living with dementia wandering in Singapore cinema adopts a specific point of view that is emblematic of the nation’s wider issues of forgetting and remembering, which takes on a particular inflection that results in an architectural environment that has little or no history attached to it. Finally, I argue that the trope of wandering in Parting works to subtly reshape Singapore’s narrative of national vulnerability that is harnessed by the government to justify its authority.

Biography MaoHui Deng is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, where he is researching into issues of time and dementia in cinema. He is also the Postgraduate Representative for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) and is a Board Member of the Insight Film Festival.

Merv Espina (Green Papaya Arts Projects, Quezon City via Skype) and Uwe Schmelter (Goethe-Institut), ‘What if you are color-blind? Goethe-Institut and the Mowelfund film workshops in Manila, 1980s-1990s’ More halfway house than institute, Mowelfund became the home of an awkward gang of friends that turned into an alternative cinema movement, a petri dish that synthesized the DNA now found everywhere in Philippine film and experimental media practice. Mowelfund was far from parochial: it had a very German and international presence through frequent collaborations with the Goethe- Institut Manila under the direction of Uwe Schmelter. Amidst the backdrop of riots and revolutions, punk rock and politics, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EDSA Revolution preceding it, the Goethe-Institut and Mowelfund brought German film artists to Manila, with the likes of Christoph Janetzko, Birger Bustorff, and Harun Farocki, to conduct filmmaking workshops. A number of the films produced in these workshops were shown in the Berlinale’s Forum program in 1989 and subsequently held in the archive of the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art. Some of these prints are the only surviving copies of these works. The screening program and discussion succeeding it takes off from several films co-produced by the Goethe-Institut and focuses on co- influences, shared sensibilities, their sideways idiosyncrasies, and attempts to situate their legacy in Philippine contemporary art and film histories.

Biography Merv Espina is an artist and researcher. He is also program director for artist-run interdisciplinary platform Green Papaya Art Projects, and cook-janitor for WSK, a media art kitchen and annual “festival of the recently possible”. He co-founded Philippine moving image screening and archiving initiative The Kalampag Tracking Agency (2014~), and the sonic arts platform Kamuning Public Radio (2016~). Recent co-curatorial work include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017), MISFITS: Pages from a loose-leaf modernity (2017), and VIVAEXCON – Capiz 2018, the 14th edition of the Philippines’ longest-running biennial art festival. He lives and plays in Metro Manila.

Fang-Tze Hsu (University of Singapore) ’When Dead Labor Speaks with a Gendered Accent: Nguyễn Trinh Thi, John Torres, and Their Found Footage’ Cinema has often functioned as a critical point of entry for reflection on and critique of subject formation, including subject formation amid the colonialism, neocolonialism and nation-building regimes of the post-World War II period. However, to what extent may moving image media, including documentaries, feature films, experimental shorts, etc., also be understood to help enunciate historical realities beyond the grand narratives of dominance? Invoking aspects of Marx’s labor theory of value, the late film scholar Paul Willemen proposed that “image-discourses, and thus the technologies associated with them, provide a particularly propitious terrain for narrations venting the tensions associated with the dead labor issue.” This paper proposes that, in the context of Cold War Asia, one particularly effective way of drawing out such tensions is by focusing on the asynchronicity between a film’s sounds and images. Examples of “acousmatic listening” are drawn from Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Eleven Men (2016), John Torres’ People Power Bombshell: A Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016) and other of their works. In addition to their shared inquiries regarding the unsettled past and their resonating approaches of repurposing found footage, these works utilize non-diegetic sound elements, namely narration and voiceover. Based upon such dialectical tensions between the visible and the audible, I attempt to situate a gendered regime of representation by historicizing how during the post-war period the ‘c’ of cinema comes to stand for capitalism, colonialism, and cold war, and how the cinema constituted by this trinity has been suffused with patriarchal violence. In other words, instead of focusing on questions of what the contents of artists’ films are about, this presentation will shed light on why and how the artists produced these films – a preliminary inquiry establishing a firmer grounding from which to approach the question of meaning.

Biography Fang-Tze Hsu is an independent researcher and curator. She holds an MA in curatorial studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme of the National University of Singapore. Her dissertation research, Cold War in the Acoustic Unconscious: Artist Films in Okinawa, Taiwan, and Philippines, has been supported by the President’s Graduate Fellowship and the FASS Promising Graduate Scholar Award. From 2010 to 2013, she served as the digital manager for the Asia Art Archive. She was appointed as a curator for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2013. In 2016, she co-curated Negative Horizon:5th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, 2016, and presented the curated research project, Working-Through: Vandy Rattana and His Ditched Footages, at the Cube Project Space, Taipei. Her other cross-disciplinary research projects include Singaporean artist Loo Zihan’s Artists' General Assembly: The Langenbach Archive (2013), FIELDS: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia (2013) co-organized by the SA SA BASSAC (Cambodia) and the ST PAUL St Gallery (Aotearoa, New Zealand), and On Site: A Centennial Retrospective of Robert Capa at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her research interests include contemporary knowledge formation, Cold War aesthetics, memory, philosophies of technology, and the embodiment of artistic praxis in everyday life. Her writings can be found in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, ARTCO Magazine (Taiwan), and LEAP (China).

Tito Imanda (Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘Building Grassroots Film Community with a Traditional Performance Art Group in Highland Java’ Building Grassroots Film Community with a Traditional Performance Art Group in Highland Java. This is a part of a thesis project exploring how collaboration between urban filmmakers and a Javanese traditional performance group shapes the latter’s adaptation to film. The project has practical and research goals. The practical part is to make a collaboration enables the traditional performers to explore a new medium for their arts and to express their cultural messages through film. Meanwhile, the research goal of this project is to record, to understand, and to make analysis of this process, hoping to lay a groundwork for further collaborations and researches in other contexts and with different communities. At the end, the thesis tries to answer the research question: “how does collaboration contribute and facilitate the group’s adaptation of its aesthetics and expression to film?”

Biography Tito Imanda is an anthropologist and filmmaker. His master thesis from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication in New York University (2007), is about the political economy of the Indonesian film industry. In 2008-2013 he developed and managed a film school at a university in Jakarta. These days he is mostly in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, finishing fieldwork for his PhD program at the Department of Media and Communication, Goldsmiths, University of London, with thesis topic: collaborative filmmaking with a wayang orang group from the foot of Mount Merapi. He is also the Head of Research and development at the Indonesian Film Board.

Ekky Imanjaya (University of East Anglia), 'Archive-led Research, New Film History, and Classic Indonesian Exploitation Cinema' For years, textual analysis or ontological approaches is a common thing among scholars and critics in the context of Indonesian cinema studies. Currently, there is an emerging trend of research where more scholars apply phenomenological or sociological approaches to research Indonesian cinema. Within these approaches, extrinsic elements are investigated and archive-led research is inevitable. In my case, I analyzed many archives in order to argue that classic Indonesian exploitation films (originally produced and circulated between 1979 and 1995 under the dictatorship of New Order) are important and the films became both the significant arenas and the objects of politics of taste involving several agencies like the State and its cultural elites, local film producers, local film distributors/exhibitors, local audiences, transnational distributors, and global fans. Therefore, my research is in line with “New Cinema History”, as Maltby puts it, “to consider their circulation and consumption, and to examine the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange” (Maltby, 2011, 1). New Cinema History approaches undertake “empirical investigation and inquiry”, which is “analysis of primary sources relating to the production and reception of feature films” (Chapman, Glancy, Harper 2009, 1). Within this spirit, the film historians basically undertake historical investigation by analyzing primary sources, both filmic (the film itself), and nonfilmic (such as trade papers, publicity materials, reviews, and fans texts) (Chapman, Glancy, Harper 2007, 3).The paper will elaborate how and why I collected, selected, and analyzed original printed documents such as magazines, newspapers, official documents (for instance, ministerial and presidential decrees and film censorship policies), trade magazines (including in-house and internal magazines published by particular film organizations), and festival film catalogs and booklets. I will focus on 3 institutions, namely Sinematek Indonesia (Indonesia’s film archive), Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (National Library of Indonesia) and Perpustakaan Umum Pemerintah Daerah Jakarta (Public Library of Jakarta Province).

Biography Ekky Imanjaya is a Bristol-based PhD student in Film Studies at University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK). He is a faculty member of Film Program at Bina Nusantara University (Jakarta, Indonesia).

May Adadol Ingawanij (University of Westminster), ‘Aesthetics of Uncertainty: History and Artists’ Moving Image in Southeast Asia’ This talk surveys a distinguishing thematic and aesthetic tendency among contemporary artists’ cinematic practices in and of Southeast Asia. It addresses ways in which artists such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyễn Trinh Thi, featured in this year’s GSFF, reflexively use cinema’s apparatuses, archives, and modes of spectatorial address, to create cinematic aesthetics addressing lived historical experiences rendered illegible by the region’s authoritarian nation-states. The talk’s motifs for exploring the relationship between the cinematic, uncertainty, and the burdens and shadows of legacies of impunity are: assemblage, frame, surface. These provide a thread for discussing the significance of the works and artists discussed as practices that create a time-space of contact with history, a tensile space and a duration of uncertainty, by incorporating, accommodating and interfacing multiple media. Yet in enacting a time-space of contact and uncertainty, artists’ cinematic practices in Southeast Asia return to cinema’s historical condition and promise of spectatorship: that of the mobility of looking, and the peculiarly public yet intimate qualities of cinematic experience.

Biography May Adadol Ingawanij is a moving image theorist, writer, curator and teacher. She is writing a book titled Contemporary Art and Animistic Cinematic Practices in Southeast Asia. Publications include ‘Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s Long Films: Currencies of Circulation and Dialectics of Spectatorship’ (2017); ‘Long Walk to Life: the Films of Lav Diaz’ (2015); ‘Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul,’ (2013); Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia (2012); ‘Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Essay Films,’ (forthcoming). Recent curatorial projects include Lav Diaz Journeys (London, 2017), On Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017), Comparing Experimental Cinemas (Bangalore, 2014). May is Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM).

Gaik Cheng Khoo (University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus), ‘Film Activism in Southeast Asia: Regional Networking and Knowledge Exchange’ This presentation is an overview of contemporary regional networking and knowledge exchange among film practitioners and theorists/academics in Southeast Asia covering different film spaces over a time period from the late 1990s till the present. Film activism is driven by film journalists, independent filmmakers and activists who are filling a knowledge gap due to the lack of formal film studies programs (the Indonesian case, Paramaditha 2017). Digital technology, the internet and globalization have also paved the way for a cosmopolitan attitude towards consumption of foreign films and art cinema beyond the usual Hollywood mainstream films. While digital is credited for opening up spaces of expression and access to alternative, non-commercial films (through DVD/VCD piracy and later torrents, downloads, file sharing, YouTube), what have changed and what haven’t two decades hence? What are the pervasive challenges since digitalization has democratized filmmaking? Cinema’s age-old ability to evoke visceral emotions from viewers has guaranteed a side- by-side interest in political filmmaking (making films that are social commentaries, that mainly have intellectual appeal) and the pleasures of narrative and visual cinema (films that appeal to our senses and instincts, to our gut feeling), the latter often supported by capitalist demands to entertain or make a profit. This paper argues that issues of state censorship (often administered in an ad hoc or random manner or for political purposes) and if it was not present before, commercial considerations, will continue to confront filmmakers after the period of experimentation is over.

Biography Associate Professor Gaik Cheng Khoo teaches cultural studies, Southeast Asian Cinema and Transnational Media at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. She organised the inaugural Association of Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference in 2004, is involved in the conference committee and has numerous publications on Malaysian independent filmmakers after her first book Reclaiming Adat (University of British Columbia Press, 2006). Her BFM radio program that includes interviews with filmmakers, archivists and film academics and historians, Reeling Southeast Asia (July - September 2013) is available as podcasts. Aside from film, Gaik also writes on food, citizenship and civil society. Her current research is on Korean migrants in Malaysia.

Mariam Lam (University of California, Riverside), ‘Found Footage: Ecological (Re)Invention in Experimental Documentary Film’ Found Footage: Ecological (Re)Invention in Experimental Documentary Film

The geopolitical space of Southeast Asia is rife with the traces of war, colonialism, natural disaster, and global capitalism. Filmmakers working in non-fictional forms must therefore play with the complexities of such spectral haunting, while maintaining and improving their material working conditions without compromising their conceptual practice, their license to shoot, so to speak. The historical relationships between nature, environmental degradation, ecological changes, and evolving living conditions require creative multidimensional coverage. Southeast Asian cinema auteurs have deployed found footage in ways that both concretize and confound established notions of place, space, infrastructure, institutionality and instrumentality. Their often subtle portrayals of life as we know it, or life as we see it, in the materials that surround us complicate our future hopes and theorize the philosophical failures that undergird our everyday. This talk will feature the provocative depictions of reinvented found footage by experimental documentary filmmakers today with a focus on Viet Nam.

Biography Mariam B. Lam is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cooperating Faculty in Ethnic Studies. She was Director of the UCR Southeast Asian Studies Research Program (SEATRiP) from 2011-2016, and co-founding co- editor of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies from 2005-2016. Her forthcoming projects include Not Coming to Terms: Viet Nam, Archival Trauma and Strategic Affect (Duke UP) and editorial anthologies Undercurrents: Southeast Asian Transnational and Diasporic Cultures (Brill Pubs) and Queer Viet Nam: Activism, Art and Artifice (HKUP).

Bliss Cua Lim (University of California, Irvine) ‘Silence, Power, and Making-Do: Philippine Cinema’s Fragile Archive’ The contours of Philippine cinema’s archival crises are alarming: of over 350 films produced before the outbreak of World War II, only five Filipino films from the American colonial period survive and only one complete nitrate film remains, Ibong Adarna (Adarna Bird, 1941). Drawing on postcolonial historiography, archival theory, and the on-the-ground realities of the Philippines’ decentralized audiovisual archive advocacy, this talk examines three issues that emerge as keywords for the crises of moving image preservation in the Philippines. First, archival silences, which comprise not only the “lost films” of Philippine cinema but also the absences that are constitutive of the production of historical narratives. Second, archival power, which names dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in the production of historical narratives, as well as archival practices of appraisal that institutionalize a minute percentage of extant records. Finally, activism, advocacy, and “making-do” — creative workarounds that have emerged to ensure the archival survival of Philippine cinema — are also expressions of archival power. In response to my research request for access copies of 16mm propaganda films made in 1971-72, on the eve of the Marcos dictatorship’s declaration of Martial Law (PFM’s Declaration of Martial Law and From a Season of Strife), a handful of archivists collaborated to produce rushed digital access copies of these films in 2015. The result of our collective efforts were undoubtedly poor images. Yet the makeshift digitization exemplified non- idealized archival practices of making-do (paggawa ng paraan) that marshal meager resources to buy time and keep things going. Given that the histories of prior state film archives’ collapse caution against the costs of inaction, perseverance and making-do in order to ensure access are striking traits of Philippine archiving cultures called-forth by conditions of archival fragility.

Biography Bliss Cua Lim is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Duke University Press, 2009; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011). She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and serves on the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media and Society published by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. With the support of a Fulbright Scholar grant, she is completing her second book manuscript on the challenges of archival film preservation facing Philippine cinema.

Philippa Lovatt (University of St Andrews) Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and is Primary Investigator of the AHRC funded research project “Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network: Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice”. Broadly speaking, her research focusses on the politics of film form. Particular areas of interest are in East Asian and Southeast Asian cinemas, experimental film and documentary, sound in audio-visual media and more recently, on the relationship between censorship and grassroots film activism in Asia. She has published her work in the journals, Screen; Music, Sound and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack and SoundEffects as well as in a number of edited collections. She is now writing a monograph, which investigates the relationship between film sound, phenomenology and the ethics of spectatorship: Sound Design and the Ethics of Listening in Global Film and Video (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

Katrina Macapagal (Queen Margaret University), ‘The Chronotope of the City in Philippine Urban Cinema’ The films that I approach as contemporary examples of Philippine urban cinema are independently produced and internationally circulated films that prominently feature, reference, or dialogue with Manila slums as setting. My study of Philippine urban cinema can be located broadly at the intersections of film studies and urban studies, a terrain that takes into account forays into the discourse of the cinematic city, or what has been called the “cinema-city nexus.” My study primarily combines two key concepts: First, drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “chronotope” (literally, time-space), I formulate the concept of the “slum chronotope” as the organising centre of narrative and character configuration in Philippine urban cinema. Second, I use Edward Soja’s theory of “spatial justice” which argues that social justice can be approached from a spatial perspective. The theory of spatial justice offers a view of the slums as spaces of in/justice, while the theory of the chronotope views slum and slum imaginaries as forms of materialised history within and beyond the film worlds. This interdisciplinary framework enables a productive approach to Philippine urban films, grounding them firmly in local and global urban history.

Biography Katrina Macapagal recently completed her PhD at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Her doctoral research generally explores intersections between human geography and film studies in Philippine independent cinema. She intends to pursue interdisciplinary studies in transnational cinema, with a particular focus on theories of space. Her earlier publications include articles on Philippine diasporic poetry, popular music, and urban graffiti.

Okkar Muang (Save Myanmar Cinema) ‘Long Neglected Stories: the Save Myanmar Cinema Project’ This talk will discuss the reasons behind the development of the Save Myanmar Film Project and the current situation of the Myanmar Film Archive. It will discuss the aims of the project, future plans and the challenges that it faces.

Biography Twenty-nine year old Maung Okkar’s film career began at the age of 14 when he starred in “Dat-khe”, a feature film directed by his father – the celebrated Burmese filmmaker U Wunna. In 2009, he joined Yangon Film School. Then, he tried his hand at directing. A philosophy graduate, Okkar’s first documentary: “Charcoal Boy” screened and competed at 16 international film festivals such as Munich International Festival of Films schools around the world. Then, he has made some documentaries and a short film. In May 2015, he worked as a film archive researcher to collect data for Myanmar Cinema Heritage Project. Recently, he has completed a film restoration summer course conducted by International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in Bologna, Italy. Currently, he is working as a project director for Save Myanmar Film Project together with his friends with the aim of saving old Myanmar films which are being neglected. He has been conducting a research on old Myanmar films as a part of the project. Filmography: Charcoal Boy (2010);The Game (2011) Let’s Get On The Bus (2012); Next Drop of Rain (2012);The Bicycle (2014); School Time (2015); The Gong (2015).

Kavich Neang (Anti-Archive, Cambodia) Cambodian new cinema is very fragile. Anti-Archive, the first Cambodian independent film company fosters young Cambodian filmmakers to re-think about their past and also their current stories, not only to understand them, but also artistically to express them in different ways.

Biography Kavich Neang, from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, studied music and dance at a young age before graduating in professional design in 2013. In 2010, he directed his first short film, A Scale Boy, as part of a documentary film workshop led by Khmer-French filmmaker Rithy Panh, who also produced his 2013 mid-length documentary film Where I Go. In 2014, he co-founded the independent production company Anti-Archive. In 2015, he directed his first short fiction film, Three Wheels, which premiered at Busan. Kavich has also joined Busan’s Asian Film Academy, Locarno Summer Academy, Talents Tokyo, Docs by the Sea, Luang Prabang Talent Lab, and Cannes Cinéfondation’s Residency. He has recently participated in panel discussions on memory and cinema in Chiang Mai, Singapore, and now Glasgow. Kavich is currently developing his first narrative feature, White Building, which received two awards at the 2016 Asian Project Market on the sidelines of the Busan Film Festival, and he is currently editing his first documentary feature, Last Night I Saw You Smiling, on a similar topic.

Hafiz Rancajale (Forum Lenteng, Indonesia), ‘Looking at the Archives, Looking at Memory Objectives’ The history of Indonesian cinema is one of the oldest in Southeast Asia. Referring to some researches, the presence of cinema in Indonesia is not so far behind the presence of cinema in Europe. It was brought by the colonial as a matter of entertainment and also to capture the colonies. The film archives are important to see what is today, what is to come. Forum Lenteng will present how the film archives are read through various forms; exhibitions, festivals, film production, theatre and performances.

Biography Artist/curator, Hafiz Rancajale, was born in Pekanbaru. He studied Fine Arts in Jakarta Institute of Art (IKJ) and one of founders of Forum Lenteng. Beside his involvement in independent film community, he is also director of documentary and experimental films. In 2003, he founded OK. Video Jakarta International Media Art Festival and until 2011 was its artistic director. In 2013, he founded ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival and has been its Artistic Director until now.

Uwe Schmelter Dr. Uwe Schmelter, born on 18th February 1945, studied German Literature, Art History and Musicology in Bonn, Paris and Vienna. Following his academic career as a tutor, lecturer and professor at the University of Bonn, the Pontifical Catholic University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he joined the Goethe-Institut in 1981, where he led the Department for Narrative and Experimental Film (1982 – 1985) and the Press and Public Relations Office (1991-1993). He was head of the Goethe-Institut in Manila (1985-1991), Copenhagen (1994-1999) and Seoul/Pyongyang (1999-2005). After being Commissioner for the ‘Germany Year in Japan 2005/2006’, he became Director of the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo, Japan, from 2005 until his retirement, as well Regional Director for the Goethe-Institutes in East-Asia (Japan, North and South Korea, PR China, Taiwan and Mongolia). From 2008 until 2010 he was the Chair of the European Union National Institute for Culture in Japan. Since March 2015 he is the Managing Director of the Festival Internacional de Música de Marvao in Portugal. In addition to many publications on his activities within the Goethe- Institut, he has written numerous articles on themes relating to German and international cultural and educational policy. He holds several honorary titles in North and South Korea, Japan and Germany, e.g. President of the Deutsch-Koreanische Gesellschaft, Curator of the ‘Korea Stiftung’, and Senior Advisor for Korean-German Affairs of the Korea Culture and Arts Foundation in Seoul.As a cultural mediator, particularly between South and North Korea, he has received many accolades such as the Writers Award, the Film Academy Award and the José Rizal Award of the Philippines, as well as receiving honorary citizenship of the city of Seoul, honorary membership of the Japanese Goethe Society, and the Federal Cross of Merit awarded by former German President Horst Köhler. Since 2010 Dr. Schmelter is a freelance consultant for international cultural and public diplomacy as well as a project and culture manager in Berlin. He is married to Ester Schmelter and father of two children, Christian and Christine Schmelter.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi (Hanoi DocLab) Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based filmmaker/moving image artist. She studied journalism and international affairs in the United States, with side courses in photography and ethnographic film. Her moving image work—including experimental documentary films, single-channels and video installations—consistently engage with memory and history, and reflect on the roles and positions of artists in society. Her materials are diverse – from video and photographs shot by herself to those appropriated from various sources including press photos, corporate videos, and classic films; her practice traverses boundaries between film and video art, installation and performance. Her video works have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions including Sydney Biennale; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013; Jakarta Biennale 2013; and Oberhausen International Film Festival. In 2009, Nguyễn founded Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and the moving image in Hanoi.

Jasmine Trice (University of California, Los Angeles), ‘Art House Screening Spaces in Manila, Philippines, 2006-2011’ This presentation examines two alternative exhibition sites in Manila, Philippines, which emerged alongside the rise of Philippine independent cinema in the early 2000s. These sites deliberately sequestered themselves away from the space of mass consumerism. These are utopian spaces; rather than intervening within present conditions (i.e., the overdeveloped mega city), they reject those conditions to create alternative futures. This presentation examines how such sites encouraged notions of a sequestered, artistic community, while at the same time embracing discourses of historicity and authenticity that implicitly link alternative exhibition to a larger Filipino public. Thus, the sites are subcultural and cloistered, terms that are integral to considering the role of alternative exhibition within a screen culture that has nationalist aims

Biography Jasmine Nadua Trice is an assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on film cultures within transnational contexts. Her particular areas of specialization include contemporary Asian cinemas, exhibition and moviegoing, cinema and urbanism, and media spaces.

Chalida Uabumrungjit (Thai Film Archive) ‘Swimming with Sharks: Thai Film Archive in the Digital Age’ In the analog era, the challenge for film preservation is to control the environment such as temperature and humidity. When it comes to the digital era, thing does not turn out to be easy as it seems. Migration becomes a non-stop continuing process. and to maintain long term storage for a large amount of data can be costly and need expertise to maintain.

Biography Chalida Uabumrungjit graduated in film from Thammasat University and film archiving from University of East Anglia, UK. She is one of the founding members of Thai Short Film and Video Festival which she served as Festival Director since 1997. She also programmes for Salaya Documentary Film Festival and Silent Film Festival in Thailand. She coordinated programmes of Thai films for various international festivals and also involve in making a number of experimental films and documentaries. She is also one of the selection commitee of AND (Asian Network of Documentary). She is one of the advocate for independent films and film preservation in Thailand. Currently she works as Deputy Director of the Film Archive, Thailand and now focus on digital preservation.

Khong Kok Wai (University of Westminster), ‘Film Censorship in Malaysia: the Apparatus’ The study analyses the current mode of censorship that is performed in the Malaysian film industry. The censorship practice is an internally differentiated form of power that exerts systematically distinctive types of control and regulation over actions and contents in the scopes of what is considered as private and public spheres. Under this practice, representations and contents performed in the public domain are more stringently monitored and castigated than similar, and probably much severe, expressions restricted to domains which are officially and culturally labelled as private. When representations and contents do not conform with normative forms, and are regarded as religious, socially and culturally “sensitive”, then both official and unofficial modes of power may be mobilised to remove the unwanted representations from the public domain. However, this form of censorship is simultaneously operated in response to the feedbacks and negotiations taken place by certain members of public and content makers as a ‘social dynamic’ of an apparatus. Case studies on the significance of media technology towards the fear of public reaction and personal accounts from interlocutors, all lend support to the view that censorship in Malaysia is a negotiated, fluid activity which may provoke more than respond to public opinion.

Biography Khong holds a Master of Communication in Screen Studies from University Sains Malaysia. His first degree is in Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) Graphic Communication from the same institution. He taught in various public and private institutions in Malaysia specialised in the area of Film History, Digital Arts, Multimedia (Animation), and Digital Publishing. Currently, he attaches with the Faculty Film, Theatre and Animation in Universiti Teknologi MARA. Recent project: As a PhD candidate in the University of Westminster, London, working on a project titled, Exploring the Fantastic: Contemporary Malaysian Cinema.