In the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of filmmakers united into film clubs, and film collectives, a shift from an individual, hierarchical model of production to one based on fluidity and embracing the DIY and ‘amateur’ spirit of such collaborations. Nevertheless, the screening and post-screening talk aim to emphasise the labour of female filmmakers within such collectives, who are often written out of the narratives of their radical efforts.

This programme highlights bold, radical and often experimental films born from the collective labour of filmmakers who rejected traditional hierarchies, aiming to create cinema for and by the people. 

Made by a group of amateur students, the 16mm Tongpan (1977) a cornerstone of Thai Third Cinema, explores rural agrarian reform and the challenges of development in the aftermath of a military dictatorship. 

Han Okhi is the founder of South Korea’s first feminist film collective, Kaidu Club in 1974, with a group of students from the prestigious Ewha Womans University in Seoul. Founded at the height of the Park Chung-hee dictatorship, Han and Kaidu Club positioned themselves in opposition to “Chungmoro”, the commercial film industry in pursuit of “destroying existing concepts”. 

The Nihon University Cinema Club (Nihon Daigaku Eiga Kenkyukai, or Nichidai Eiken) was a collective formed in the late 1950s, closely tied to the university’s communist organization. Wan (1961), led by Masao Adachi, emerged in the aftermath of the failed student protests against the 1960 Anpo US-Japan Security Treaty. 

As a collective, Sine Screen is interested in discovering alternate, non-institutional modes to film labour, and is interested in prompting questions around the particularities of such film productions. In the post-screening talk with curator and scholar Dr. May Adadol Ingawanij, we will be focusing on the production of Tongpan.