by Cici Peng
At IFFR 2025, the ‘Through Cinema We Shall Rise’ archive programme celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. This meeting of 29 nations—either recently independent or undergoing the process of decolonisation—was the first large-scale gathering of leaders from the Global South. Establishing a common Third Worldist goal to promote economic and cultural solidarity, self-determination and non-alignment, the Conference sparked the cinematic exchange of the Afro-Asian Film Festival in its three editions in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1958), in Cairo, Egypt (1960), and its final edition in Jakarta, Indonesia (1964). The official festival announced that it was organised in accordance with the “principles of the Bandung Conference”, to create “solidarity and friendship among people”.
The Afro-Asian Film Festival emerged as a cultural extension of the Bandung Conference, as national leaders recognised cinema as a powerful tool for anti-colonial struggle, national identity and cross-cultural diplomacy. Although under-documented, the Afro-Asian Festivals were the earliest formulations of a cinematic ‘Third Worldism’, a precursor to the militant tradition of the ‘Third Cinema’ movement in South America, as articulated by Argentines Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their 1969 call-to-arms: “Towards a Third Cinema.” However, many of the films featured had a strong affinity to genre filmmaking, from musical comedies, to ‘women’s films’, and more propagandistic epic fare.
What’s particularly striking is witnessing the conflicting political agendas across the festivals—each of the films selected represented a ‘state’ and were rooted in the hierarchical, and often conflicting dynamics of cold war politics—between a model of ‘peaceful coexistence’ as vouched for by the Soviets against a more militant Chinese counterpart. According to Indonesian film curator, artist and researcher Bunga Siagian, the first edition at Tashkent was said to have played a role as a mediator for the Second World (Soviet Union colonies) with the Third world, while the Cairo edition brought Pan-Arabism together with wider anti-colonial politics. But by 1964, global anti-colonial struggles had intensified, with the Vietnam War and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo. Indonesia’s president Sukarno became increasingly radical, aligning with China and revolutionary movements over other moderate non-aligned leaders. The Jakarta festival showcased films that openly supported armed struggle and Marxist revolutionary movements, making it the most militant edition.
At the IFFR ‘Through Cinema We Shall Rise’ programme, 15 films that played across the three editions of the festival—from Chinese comedy of errors Five Golden Flowers (1959) and Lebanese family drama Where To (1957) to the militant Vietnamese melodrama A Phu and His Wife (1960). There is a marked lack of sub-Saharan African films, apart from two films, Freedom for Ghana (1957) by former British Army filmmaker Sean Graham, and Law of Baseness (1962), a didactic Soviet documentary on the injustices of colonialism, capitalism and the murder of Lumumba. Both films serve alternate interests: although Law of Baseness accounts for the suffering of colonised Africans under colonialism, the film centres solely on the victimhood of the people under the evil heart of imperialism and capitalism—dramatically represented through an animated, pulsating dollar coin – rather than any possibility of co-resistance among Africans without Soviet intervention. Freedom for Ghana portrays the liberation of Ghana from British colonialism as a friendly agreement between the two nations with newsreel footage of the celebrations, and the momentous arrival of the Duchess of Kent. The short documentary opts to display the liberatory event through a celebratory Christian ceremony, a Miss Ghana float and a Ghanaian flag raised next to its British counterpart—becoming unwittingly a film about colonial inheritance and its enmeshment within Ghanaian society.
Against such ideologically warped representations of independence, the Indonesian film Turang (1958) offers a radically different vision—on the crucial role of everyday people in the anti-colonial struggle. The director, Bachtiar Siagian, was one of Indonesia’s seminal leftist filmmakers whose work was destroyed after the 1965 US-backed anti-communist coup which led to a military takeover by Suharto, the mass purge of suspected leftists, and the establishment of an authoritarian New Order regime which subsequently destroyed most of the leftist cinema of the country. Turang was rediscovered in 2024 at the Russian Federation’s Film Archive as a result of Bunga Siagian’s research into the Tashkent edition of the Afro-Asian Festival, where Turang was first screened. Turang directly counters the dominant narrative posited by the New Order regime that the independence struggle against the Dutch was only gained through the military’s interventions. The retrieval of the film rewrites not only Indonesian film history, but the history of nationhood.
Instead, Siagian favours depictions of the resistance embedded within rural life in Sebereya, a village in North Sumatra where the indigenous Karo community resides. The most dramatic action bookends the film: we begin and end with a gunfight. In the first sequence, two guerilla fighters, disguised as cart-riders, are intercepted by the Dutch soldiers. Upon searching their cart, the colonists discover ammunition pellets nuzzled in their sacks of rice. One guerilla dies, but Rusli manages to escape and is sent into hiding in a rice barn in the Seberaya village. He is nursed back to health by Tipi and protected by the community leader, Tipi’s father. However, when Tipi’s father is arrested for aiding the freedom fighters, Tipi and Rusli’s budding romantic relationship is cut short by the invasion of the Dutch colonists into the village, leading to the real-life Rawagede massacre.
The middle of the film is preoccupied with the seemingly more passive moments of daily life as Siagian keenly represents different modes of anticolonial resistance. In a single take, we see the moment where Rusli is taken into the hut’s attic into hiding, yet the camera remains on Tipi – the active protector, carer and as Siagian implies, resistance fighter. Throughout the film, we hear two songs – first, the titular Turang, a popular folk-song performed by a melancholic Tipi, then another folk song, delivered by the whole village asa chorus. Siagian is keen to emphasise the specificity of locality, of communal living, from toiling the land to traditional weaving practices. Anti-colonialism is not solely about militant resistance; it is also crucially the preservation of traditions, languages and the specificity of the local. Notably, bamboo can be seen in almost every setting—as pails for water collection, as poles for the huts, as part of the natural landscape, as the title card of the film. Yuki Aditya, an Indonesian filmmaker tells me that bambu runcing (bamboo spears) were the weapons used by the freedom fighters against the Dutch who were armed with guns.
Unlike some of the more propagandistic fare of the Afro-Asian roster, Turang is keen to represent the fractures within leftist movements. Towards the end of the film, Rusli and his commander blow up in a heated disagreement. When Rusli asks to bring Tipi with him as part of the resistance army, the commander retorts that a girl like Tipi would distract the group. Such a key moment within the narrative highlights the troubled gender dynamics within leftist movements, a narrative that was oftentimes systematically erased from liberation movements.
Although many of the films within the ‘Through Cinema We Shall Rise’ programme are concerned with the breakaway from traditional gender roles, the representation of female liberation is always nestled within the wider framework of nationalism. Melodrama, as a clear filmic language, is manipulated by various films to mediate a particular ideological standpoint which frequently supplants romantic desire for a revolutionary desire. Both The Red Detachment of Women (1961), a militant Chinese film, andThe Open Door (1963), an Egyptian melodrama, played at the 1964 Jakarta edition and concern the role of women in revolution.
Inspired by real events, The Red Detachment follows the epic journey of Wu Qionghua, a young woman held captive as a slave by feudal landlord Nan Batian. When she is freed by Changqing, a Communist Party Representative disguised as a wealthy businessman, he urges her to join the women’s army. Under the warmth and guidance of her comrades, Qionghua transforms from an intemperate girl seeking vengeance into a level-headed leader for the Communist movement. The Open Door, adapted from Latifa al-Zayyat’s coming-of-age novel of the same name, takes on a more ideological turn under Egyptian filmmaker Henry Barakat. He situates the upper-middle-class protagonist, Laila, and her romantic struggles against the backdrop of two pivotal political moments: the 1952 Egyptian Revolution and the 1956 Suez Crisis. Over the course of the film, Laila continually suffers under the men in her life: the patriarch of her family, her first love Essem, who cheats on her and sexually assaults her, and her chauvinistic professor Dr. Fouad, who is set as her husband in an arranged marriage. In contrast, the freedom fighter Hussain emerges as her only ally, framing Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist revolution as the sole path to women’s liberation in Egypt.
In both films, the relationship between desire, ideology and power becomes increasingly tangled in the interplay between traditional melodrama and revolutionary romanticism. In The Red Detachment, it is evident that Qionghua and commanding officer Changqing are paired as lovers; various shot-reverse-shot close-ups frame the pair coyly exchanging eye contact. Most notably, the ghost of the ‘women’s film’ lingers in the shadows. A subsect of the melodrama, ‘women’s films’ are often marked by a male saviour who rescues a woman from her hostile living situation – where she is usually an orphan or faces abusive family members – and becomes her lover. However, The Red Detachment eschews the third act of conjugal happiness, as Changqing is burned alive at the hands of the feudal lords while Qionghua looks on, holding onto the four coins Changqing gave her, the only remnants of their camaraderie.
When Qionghua is initially saved by Changqing, he gives her four coins to buy something to eat during her journey to seek out the mythologised women’s army. Throughout the film, the coins appear four times—each time taking on a more complex dynamic. First, it becomes a token of Changqing’s duty and care as a comrade; the second time is perhaps the most evocative. Qionghua takes out the coins, gently stroking them as she talks effusively about Changqing’s leadership with her fellow female soldier Honglian as they prepare for bed. She says, “Changqing teaches us lessons and punishes us. However, when he punishes us, we are sincerely convinced.”
Here, ‘convinced’ in Mandarin directly translates to ‘satisfaction within one’s heart’—an evident entanglement of desire and power. At the end of the conversation, they vow to each other that they will join the Communist Party together, lying in bed, hand-in-hand. Each moment of physical touch—the coins, and Qionghua and Honglian’s intimacy—are entangled between Qionghua’s admiration and desire for Changqing, a man in power, against the homoeroticism of her shared ambitions with Honglian.
Yearning, intimacy and private romantic desire are entangled with and sublimated into the common goal of communist enlightenment. The coins themselves become an intermediary between personal affection and collective ambition and duty—they are marked by the intimacy of touch, yet they also mark the symbolism of sacrifice, as Qionghua finds the coins on the battleground, after Changqing has been murdered. The coins then become a symbol of his sacrifice, and her conviction in their shared communist cause—as personal affection translates to duty.
The Open Door similarly utilises the language of the ‘women’s film’, where Laila’s entrapment is directly enmeshed with the bourgeois family structure, where women function as part of the domestic system rather than agents. Just as The Red Detachment utilises the tactile intimacy of the coins as a potent symbol, The Open Door features the tea-cup as the symbol of patriarchy. Laila becomes aware of her first love Essem’s infidelity when she spies a spilled cup of coffee in Essem’s room where his female servant and mistress scrubs away at the stain. The spillage functions as both a sexual innuendo and strips away Laila’s image of the feminine ideal. It’s a moment of realisation of her place as a woman, and the mistress’s place—their class divisions, and how both as women are inevitably straying and failing within the impossibility of the whore and Madonna binaries.
During Laila’s engagement party, Laila stares into her tea cup where a fly has drowned—her own suffocation is evident. Right after this sequence, she catches her cousin Gamila cheating on her husband, followed by a brilliant speech in which Gamila berates Laila for judging her, lamenting her unhappiness within the strictures of an unloving arranged marriage. She claims that without the possibility for a divorce, her only options remain adultery. Despite having been the role-model ‘perfect’ wife, Gamila’s reality breaks apart Laila’s conception of femininity. With the impossibilities of domestic compliance, the final scene where Laila chooses Hussein is thrilling and dynamic: she rushes towards him as his train slowly heads toward the resistance forces in Port Said. As she runs up to the train, countless hands reach out the train car to pull her in—until she finally falls into the arms of her lover—and, symbolically, the multiple outreached arms of the nationalist movement.
Desire throughout all the films is problematised: in Turang and The Red Detachment of Women, romantic love is constantly deferred and out of reach. Out of tragedy arises the greatest desire—for liberation, a revolutionary yearning. In The Open Door, Laila’s happily-ever-after becomes entangled with the fulfillment of her love story, but also of her move towards revolutionary politics. Marriages within the Afro-Asian Festival roster often function symbolically as turning points. In Thai film Santi Vina (1954), an arranged marriage tears two lovers apart, yet this is framed as a positive sacrifice as the titular Santi then commits to monkhood. In Five Golden Flowers, the wedding becomes the central dramatic ligature of mistaken identity. In A Phu and His Wife, the “wife” is consecrated not in any actions of conjugal love, but in companionship and shared revolutionary struggle. As feminist scholars including Mary Ann Doane and Lauren Berlant have deduced, the love-marriage at the end of Hollywood melodramas often signals the end of public and political life for women, however, within our Afro-Asian films, the global vernacular of melodrama is re-imagined in their locally specific contexts. The happy love-marriage promises an ever-widening world to women – a future of love, of liberty, of revolution.
Cici Peng is a London-based writer and programmer for Sine Screen, a collective that programmes moving-image by East and South East Asian artists and filmmakers.
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