This film programme was originally intended to be screened on-site in parallel with the exhibition Non-Aligned. During Singapore’s Circuit-Breaker period, selected films were available to be streamed on our website for limited periods of time, even after the Centre re-opened to the public on 27 June 2020. As of 18 August 2020, the Film Programme is being screened exclusively on site in the Single Screen, with limited capacity and physical distancing measures in place. NTU CCA Singapore gratefully acknowledges the collaboration of the curators, filmmakers, and distributors in making online screening possible during the global COVID-19 crisis.
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This programme features films that engage post-colonial processes covering different moments and geopolitical contexts. The Asian-African Conference in 1955, known as the Bandung Conference, amidst the complex processes of decolonization, established self-determination, non-aggression, and equality as part of the core values that then formed the Non-Aligned Movement. This history is unpacked and contextualised through this series of screenings.
Co-curated by writer and curator Mark Nash and film researcher Vladimir Seput.
Screening on loop during opening hours.
Joris Ivens, Indonesia Calling, 1946
35mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 22 min
This film shows the role trade union seaman and waterside workers in Sydney played in Indonesia’s independence struggle after World War II. Comprising different nationalities and races, they united together to prevent the departure of Indonesia-bound Dutch ships that carried weapons meant to bring the Indonesian National Revolution to a halt. The film seeks to distil aspects of the historical context of the events depicted in the film and gives insight to the major re-alignments in the relationship between Australia and Indonesia.
4 – 16 August 2020 (On loop in The Single Screen and also available online)
First conference of Non-Aligned Movement, 1961
Archive footage, colour, sound, 10 min 51 sec
Archive footage from the first conference of the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement, otherwise known as the Belgrade Conference, presenting historical events from the meeting. The inaugural conference was initiated by three key figures: Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia; Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt; and Jawaharlal Nehru, First Prime Minister of India. Attended by 25 countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the conference is a direct response to the division of sphere of influence settled between the major world forces after WWII and the Cold War, enabling members to independently formulate their own position in international politics.
18 – 23 August 2020 (On loop in The Single Screen)
Ousmane Sembène, Borom Sarret, 1963
35mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 18 min
Borom Sarret, considered to be the first African film by a black African, is a portrayal of poverty and inequality in postcolonial Africa. It follows the daily life of a Dakar “borom sarret”, or cart driver in Wolof (a language of Senegal), who is constantly being taken advantage of by others. Feeling hopeless about his situation, he compares modern life to that of a working slave, imprisoned in a cycle of poverty.
Restored in 2013 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in association with Institut National de l’Audiovisuel and the Sembène Estate. Restoration work was carried out at Laboratoires Éclair and Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Restoration funding provided by Doha Film Institute.
Mikhail Kalatozov, I am Cuba (Soy Cuba), 1964
35mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 141 min
Narrated by Raquel Ravuelta, a seminal figure in Cuban theatre, film, television and radio, as “The Voice of Cuba,” I am Cuba follows four stories of Cubans during the Cuban Revolution. Maria works at a Havana nightclub; Pedro is a tenant farmer; Enrique, a young university student, is part of the intellectual resistance; and Mariano is a peasant who joins the rebel army. The script was co-authored by the Cuban novelist Enrique Pineda Barnet and the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
25 – 30 August 2020 (Every hour in The Single Screen)
Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl (La noire de… ), 1966
35mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 60 min
The film chronicles Senegal’s first years of independence by following a young ambitious woman, Diouana, who moves to the French Riviera with a bureaucrat and his wife who return to France after working in Dakar. Originally hired as the family nanny, she becomes enslaved as a maid in France. A human drama and a radical political statement, Black Girl critiques the enduring colonial mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Black Girl was Ousmane Sembène’s first feature film and the first black African feature film which screened at Cannes. It alsowon the Prix Jean Vigo and top prize at the Carthage Film Festival.
Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of The Film Foundation.
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/ L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Sembène Estate, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, INA, Eclair laboratories and the Centre National de Cinématographie. Restoration funded by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
1 – 6 September 2020 (12pm, 1.45pm, 3.30pm, 5.15pm in The Single Screen)
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968
35mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 97 min
The film’s narrative, based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes, is presented through the lens of Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, during the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. His family decides to retreat to Miami during the turmoil of social changes. The film is interspersed with real-life documentary footage of protest and political events in which Sergio’s life and personal relationship unfolds. As the threat of foreign invasion looms over Sergio, his desire for companionship also intensifies.
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’ Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC). Restoration funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
8 – 20 September 2020 (12pm, 1.30pm, 3pm, 4.30pm, 5.45pm in The Single Screen)
Želimir Žilnik, Early Works (Rani Radovi), 1969
35mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 58 min
Winner of the Golden Berlin Bear Award at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival, Early Works (Ravi Radovi) focuses on the June 1968 student demonstrations in Belgrade, as well as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the same year. Both incidents happened against an international backdrop of student protests, political movements and anti-colonial struggles around the world. In the film, three young men and a girl called Yugoslava attempt to start a revolution in the countryside after being inspired by the early writings by Karl Marx, but are unsuccessful.
8 – 20 September 2020 (In The Single Screen)
Želimir Žilnik, Shorts: Black Film (Cri Film), 1971
16 mm transferred to digital file, b&w, sound, 14 min
An example of the Yugoslav Black Wave, the film movement in Yugoslavia in the 1960s to 1970s, Shorts: Black Film (Cri Film) is a spontaneous effort by Žilnik to highlight socio-political issues. In the wee hours, he approaches six homeless men on the streets of Novi Sad. Žilnik interviews them and allows them to sleep over at his home. Over the next few days, he speaks to members of the public, social workers, and the police, but nobody is able to offer any solutions.
Karpo Godina, Litany of Happy People (Zdravi ljudi za razonodu), 1971
35mm transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 15 min
The Litany of Happy People is a song-film about the diverse group of people living harmoniously in rural Vojvodina, an autonomous province of Serbia known for its multi-cultural and multi-ethnic identity. The film presents families with multi-ethnic backgrounds, standing in front of their seemingly similar but colourful rural houses. The film won numerous awards at short film festivals.
Karpo Godina, About Art of Love or a Film with 14441 Frames (O ljubavnim veštinama ili film sa 14441 kvadratom), 1972
Colour, sound, 10 min
This film presents an almost journalistic report of the female textile workers and male military soldiers in the Macedonian village of Stip. Interwoven with military footage and shots of the village, the alternating scenes present the two groups in proximity, while being completely isolated. The film went through a thorough restoration process in 2016 and was shown at the 30th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy.
22 – 27 September 2020 (12pm, 1.30pm, 3pm, 4.30pm, 5.45pm in The Single Screen)
Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask, 1995
35mm transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 70 min
This film interrogates the life and work of Frantz Fanon, a highly influential anti-colonial writer, civil rights activist, and psychoanalytic theorist from Martinique. The docudrama is interspersed with archival footage of Fanon as well as interviews with family members and colleagues. Reflecting on the black body and its representations, the film is rooted in the black arts movement in Britain and North America.
#1: Mise-en-Scéne and Misalignments: Resetting the Postcolonial Stage
While the Cold War raged on in the years following 1945, in the spaces between East and West, smaller theatres of war were emerging throughout the postcolonial world. This collection highlights moments of mise-en-scène that reset a global stage framed by colonial axes of power, featuring thinkers and artists such as Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, Stefano Harney, Škart, and Bojana Piškur.
Paradise Lost: Lecture: Postcolonial critique today – Stefano Harney
7 March 2014
Referencing the works of Zarina Bhimji and Trinh T. Minh-ha in the exhibitionParadise Lost, Dr Stefano Harney investigates the renewed power of postcolonial critique today. By returning to the great thinkers of the “colonial situation” and its aftermath, Harney re-evaluates the proposition that globalisation has erased “old ideas of the lines between coloniser and colonised.”
Theatrical Fields: Special Brunch and Screening Session with Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
26 October 2014
Dr Mark Nash and Isaac Julien discuss theatricality as criticality through Vagabondia (2000), Julien’s seven-minute film for Theatrical Fields, in which the figure of the vagabond is used to explore how the Sir John Soane’s Museum collection has benefitted from colonisation. Julien’s Playtime (2014), a part-documentary part-fiction exploration of global capital, plays following their conversation.
Residencies Insights: Non-Aligned Movement: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, New Modes of Creativity
22 November 2017
Belgrade-based collective Škart and Bojana Piškur situate the Non-Aligned Movement’s ideas, ideals, and principles in the present and apply them to exhibition-making and cultural exchange. Looking beyond the complex history of the Non-Aligned Movement, they map out possible prototypes for institutions, networks, and politics within art and culture today.
#2: Phantasms and Futurities: Decolonial Propositions
From a global stage reset in Mise-en-Scéne and Misalignments, this collection rescripts the linear trajectories of colonial pasts and postcolonial presents, towards the realisation of decolonised futures. Prof Timothy Murray noted in his keynote lecture that “the theatrical script always opens to the arrival of the future; they are contingent and dependent upon futurity”. Artists, performers, and curators, such as Zarina Muhammad and Brigitte van der Sande enact and identify heterotopias — spatial alterities or counter-sites wherein alternative realities are constructed — that rewrite these politicised narratives through explorations of mythmaking and science fiction.
Theatrical Fields: Symposium: Screening Theatrical Phantasms: Toward an Uncertain Futurity
Keynote Lecture by Prof Timothy Murray
23 August 2014
This talk addresses the fascination of artworks in our previous exhibition Theatrical Fields in 2014, which introduces theatricality as a critical strategy in performance, film and video. In providing a brief theoretical overview of “the politics of theatricality,” Murray will reflect on the exhibition’s screenic re-possession of cinematic characters, buried stories, and influential texts in ways that challenge the historical groundings of theatricality in the ethnocentric certainty of culture and law.
Lecture Performance: Flowers from our Bloodlines by Zarina Muhammad, artist; Stefania Rossett, choreographer; Vivian Wang pianist; Eric Lee, artist; and Tini Aliman, sound artist
22 September 2017
Drawing from concepts of the demonised and desired body, gender-based archetypes, and mythmaking, this lecture performance invokes family histories and revokes the lineages of colonisation in Southeast Asia. Intergenerational and cross-cultural exchanges, facilitated by storytelling, rituals, gestures, and embodied movement, are explored through the rites of the Wolf Spider and the Harimau Jadian (Were-Tiger), and their multiple translations and adaptations.
Residencies Insights: Speculations on other futures by Brigitte van der Sande, former Curator-in-Residence
6 December 2018
Brigitte van der Sande explores how science fiction is used to envision alternative futures and critique existing power structures while shunning censorship, within countries where continuous change is the status quo because of war or political instability. Her long-term project Other Futures, “a multidisciplinary online and offline platform for thinkers and builders of other futures”, features non-Western science fiction makers and thinkers.
#3: Tidalectic Topographies, Counter Cartographies
Extending the exploration of counter-sites from Phantasms and Futurities, this collection carries postcolonial inquiry from landlocked cartographies to liquid liminalities. Reflecting on shifting geopolitical, sociocultural, ethnoreligious, and environmental rhythms that ripple throughout the global hydrosphere, artists, curators, and scholars including Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, Melati Suryodarmo, Prof Philippe Pirotte, Tita Salina, Irwan Ahmett, Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta, and Dr Cynthia Chou introduce a tidalectic worldview – in the tradition of Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite – as a way of troubling territorial borders that became embedded during the post-Cold War wave of nationalist independence movements.
In Conversation Part I: Arus Balik with artists Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, and Melati Suryodarmo, Moderated by curator Philippe Pirotte
23 March 2019
This panel discussion focuses on the Indonesian epic Arus Balik (1995) – loosely translated to mean “turn of the tide” – by revolutionary writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, which served as the starting point for the eponymous exhibition Arus Balik – from below the wind to above the wind and back again(2019). Three of the participating artists – Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, and Melati Suryodarmo – join exhibition curator Philippe Pirotte in a discussion on Pramoedya’s body of work, its influence and legacy, as well as notions of censorship and the forbidden book.
Performance: A Tumbling Inch by Former Artists-in-Residence Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina
11 June 2019
A Tumbling Inch is a performative action by Jakarta-based artists Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, which crystallised in the hydrospheric spatiality between Batam, the Indonesian island closest to Singapore, and the undulating maritime borders between the two countries. The work revolves around a nostalgic longing for the Lion City. Following the free movement of sea waves across the Straits of Malacca, the performance addresses archipelagic histories and the impact of global economic development.
The Current Convening #3 Tabu / Tapu – Who Owns the Ocean?
Rights of Cultures, Rights of Nature: Case Studies by Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta, Director, Oceania Centre for Arts, and Dr Cynthia Chou, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa
27 January 2018
Rights of Cultures, RIghts of Nature features case studies that position oceanic spaces as charged relational spaces. Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta’s exposition on tabu/tapu – the Fijian indigenous practice of taboo – outlines the relationality between environment and peoples, complicated by histories of colonial extractivism and the globalising project of cultural and environmental commodification. Dr Cynthia Chou brings these relationalities closer to home with a study of the Orang Suku Laut of the Riau archipelago. The practices of oceanic indigenous communities presented explore how a tidalectic way of living can inform modes of engagement with the hydrosphere, challenge conceptions of land-based embeddedness, and contribute to a vision of fluid futures.
#4: Summoning Spectres: Historiography as Hauntology
This month’s curated selection of NTU CCA Singapore’s past programmes draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology – the return or persistence of elements from the past manifesting as ghosts and apparitions. – Summoning Spectres: Historiography as Hauntology speaks to the remnants of personal and collective cultural memory incompletely erased by imperial and colonial violence. These traces of erasure remain inscribed in post-Cold War regional histories and embedded in their lexicon and legacy. Using historiography as a method of inquiry, this playlist showcases the ways in which curator Dr June Yap, artists Sung Tieu, Amy Lien, and Enzo Camacho approach the subjectivation of colonial spectres through their practices, to surface historical narratives of oppression and to summon the ghosts of lost futures.
Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History
In the Interest of Time by Dr June Yap, Director of Curatorial Programmes and Publications, Singapore Art Museum
28 October 2017
Through a survey of historiographical works by artists Nguyen Trinh Thi and Ho Tzu Nyen, Dr June Yap addresses how cinematic works engage their medium specificity in a play of historical phantoms and repressed collective memories. These works contribute to a broader artistic tradition involving the subjectivation of histories, which is at its heart a process of self-determination: “in subjectivation there is constitution — the constitution of the self and or an identity… as a rising, as produced or perpetuated… as temporal, as arising from relations, as produced in a struggle”. As Yap aptly phrases, “in temporal consciousness, an identity is arrived.”
Residencies Insights: Two Worlds, Four Spirits by Sung Tieu, Former Artist-in-Residence
3 December 2019
Central to the artistic practice of Sung Tieu is a personal experience of migration from Vietnam to Germany, which impels her to address Post-Cold War histories and the multiple negotiations that underpin a diasporic identity haunted by the spectres of French colonialism in Vietnam and Cold War military violence during the American-Vietnam wars. In this talk, the artist discusses recent projects — Memory Dispute (2017), Coral Sea As Rolling Thunder (2017), Remote Viewing (2017) and Loveless(2019) — which variously employ text, performance, installation, moving image, and sound to convey a sense of dislocation while offering deliberate interventions into canonical readings of history.
Behind the Scenes: On Alfonso Ossorio’s Angry Christ mural by artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho
1 December 2018
In this talk, collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho present their research on the Filipino-American modernist painter, Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), focusing on his 1950 mural, Angry Christ. For the artists, this mural, located in the province of Negros Occidental, the “sugar bowl of the Philippines”, is a “multivalent cipher”. When it is decoded, spectres of sixteenth century Spanish colonial violence — from the accorded name “Negros” to enforced religious, economic, and environmental functions — and the ghosts of indigenous people who were displaced or exterminated materialise. Lien and Camacho question whether the Angry Christ can be “radically reprogrammed” from the specific and highly privileged subjectivity of Ossorio, its maker, and the Ossorio family’s sugar dynasty, its commissioning patron.
]]>Introduction by editors: Ute Meta Bauer, NTU CCA Founding Director and Anca Rujoiu, NTU CCA Singapore Manager, Publication
Followed by screening of Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia, Ulrike Ottinger, Germany 1989, 165mins. Coproduction with Popular-Film GmbH, Leinfelden in cooperation with ZDF, Mainz, and LaSept, Paris.
A limited amount of publications will be available for sale.