Of actors and activists

There’s a scene in the North Vietnamese film A Phủ and His Wife (1960) where Mị, the downtrodden wife of an abusive feudal lord, looks determinedly into the distance with what can only be described as a revolutionary glint in her eyes. It’s a pivotal moment where she decides to set free A Phủ, a serf enslaved by her husband, and together they run away to join an independence league fighting the French colonisers. When I encountered this scene, I sat blinking back tears in one of Rotterdam’s cinemas, moved by Mị’s radical act of resistance.

In that cinema and in others around the city, the International Film Festival Rotterdam was in full swing. In commemoration of 70 years since the Bandung Conference, IFFR held a focus programme titled ‘Through Cinema We Shall Rise!’ of Afro-Asian films for its 2025 edition. For eight days, I watched people fight against colonialism and the ruling classes, immersed in militant stories far removed from the polite networking and banal exhaustion of festival life. The more screenings I attended, the more absurd the programme title seemed: what could possibly be revolutionary at a major international film festival in the Global North?

And yet. Politics has once again come to the fore at major festivals recently, from the tiny house fiasco at last year’s Berlinale to the pro-Palestine protests held at IDFA. The boycott of this year’s edition of Berlinale over its pro-Israel stance rerouted many filmmakers and critics to IFFR, a festival that has managed to go relatively unscrutinised. Perhaps the climate was right after all for the festival to inspire some revolutionary spirit in its audience.

If so, that inspiration were to spring forth from the conference that was held in 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia, as a summit meeting of 29 newly independent and decolonising countries that were neither aligned with the United States nor the Soviet Union. These countries had varying political affiliations and leanings but were brought together by their mutual desire to decolonise and stay decolonised, and it was here that the notion of the Third World started to take root. The conference gave rise to the Afro-Asian film festival, held three times in Tashkent (1958), Cairo (1960), and Jakarta (1964) respectively. IFFR’s focus programme includes 12 films that were screened at these festivals, as well as a contemporary Tibetan film, Four Rivers Six Ranges (2025) that was inspired by the “Bandung spirit”.

It was this spirit of Bandung, the friendship and solidarity amongst the Afro-Asian peoples, that the festivals aimed to promote. They became sites of cultural exchange and discussion, as well as disagreements over what anticolonial cinema should be. The Chinese delegation was reportedly unhappy with the inaugural edition’s programme, citing its lack of militancy: “we are not asking for peace, but aim to achieve it through armed struggle.” The lineup was indeed diverse. Revolutionary films featuring guerrilla warfare against colonial forces like Turang (1957) screened alongside neorealist dramas that had competed at Cannes such as Where To? (1957).

Contradictions were also apparent at this year’s IFFR. The Chinese film Serfs (1965) tells the story of the People’s Liberation Army emancipating Tibetan serfs from the tyranny of feudal lords, a narrative lambasted by Tibetans as one that attempts to justify China’s occupation of Tibet. “The film is presented at IFFR with a view to invite thought and discussion. For an alternative perspective of the same historical events, see Four Rivers Six Ranges”, reads the programme notes. It seems that the Tibetan film was included in the same program to create a balance, or to put the films “in dialogue with each other”, in festival speak. China and Tibet each called for the other’s film to be removed from the festival, and it’s unclear whether any dialogue came out of this programming. But it does call into question the role of the film festival, as a seemingly neutral party that can platform films with not only opposing ideologies but also opposing versions of the same history. Does the film festival have a political stance? Does it even fulfil its claim of promoting thought and discussion?

Before each screening, programmer Stefan Boros gave a short introduction to contextualise the film and its history, making a disclaimer that the film is “propagandistic” and telling us to “never stop the critical thinking!” Obligingly, the audience snickered during the screening of The Red Detachment of Women (1961) when Qionghua, a slave girl turned revolutionary, proudly receives her communist party certificate. As for myself, watching her joyfully march in the women’s red army after years of being mistreated by both the patriarchy and the feudal system made tears prick in my eyes. I can’t help feeling bothered by the way the festival frames these films, dismissing them as propagandistic and talking about them purely as relics of history. It seems like IFFR is happy to platform solidarity and resistance as long as they can neatly relegate it to the past, hermetically sealed and packaged as a unique festival going experience.

A commonality of the films in the programme is their status as popular cinema. Far from Western conceptions of militant cinema that utilise Brechtian alienation techniques, the films immerse the viewer in their narratives of melodrama and romance. Bachtiar Siagian, the director of Turang, had a filmmaking formula that he described as “Pil Kina Bandung” (Bandung Quinine Pill), akin to making a medicine of revolutionary spirit coated in a sweet layer of entertainment. He believed that it was possible to make cinema both fun and deeply political, movies that the masses could enjoy. What use is a film if no one watches it?

Siagian was a leftist filmmaker, and Turang was based on his experiences as a guerilla fighting against the Dutch alongside the indigenous Karo people, whom the film was made with. In the Sumatran village where the film was shot, the guerrillas sit around the fire singing revolutionary songs: “When things contradict what we stand for / We have no choice but to fight for freedom.” My heart swells, I get goosebumps listening to this rousing choir. Am I falling prey to propaganda for being moved by anticolonial resistance?

Maybe my strong emotional response to these films is a sign that I’ve been brainwashed, or perhaps I’m just inspired by their intense optimism. The people in the films fight for a better world, they will win against the tyranny of the colonisers and the ruling classes. Their confidence reflects a moment in history when the hegemony of global capitalism did not yet appear inevitable, a hopeful period when so many former colonies were gaining their independence and sovereignty. It’s a huge contrast to today’s slew of “anti-capitalist movies” that claim to critique the system but don’t offer any solutions or alternatives, only functioning to reify capitalism as our bleak immutable reality.

The films make me feel like I too can rise, that is until I leave the cinema, and I am once again surrounded by the totalising neutrality of IFFR promotional material. Perhaps it was naive of me to think that audiences can be radicalised at a high-profile film festival, where even the most militant cinema can be commodified. Yet solidarity and resistance were the main driving forces behind the Afro-Asian film festivals IFFR commemorated, and the films often went on to be widely screened in the delegates’ countries, building international ties and film cultures that opposed the hegemony of Hollywood. Beyond official events like conferences or festivals, transnational solidarity was and still is an integral part of militant film production and distribution. Once, the Italian communist party financed the developments of negatives for Palestinian films. Today, militant Palestinian titles like They Do Not Exist (1974) by Mustafa Abu Ali continue to be screened in community cinemas all over the world, accompanied by long discussions, fundraising, and protest organising. Unlike the exclusivity of a major festival, these are screenings that anyone with even a passing interest in leftism and cinema can partake in.

In spite of the context in which they were presented, the films in ‘Through Cinema We Shall Rise!’ did give me a strong inclination to become more militant in my everyday life, to go to more community screenings and join grassroots film collectives. I leave Rotterdam more determined. We must resist the passive spectatorship reinforced by film festivals and become active participants in our modes of film exhibition, to rise through cinema on nobody’s terms but our own, to become, according to Fernando Solanas and Ocatvio Getino in Towards a Third Cinema, “an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films.”

 

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