Letters to the Future: Southeast Asian Cinema
program description
Letters to the Future features a selection of Southeast Asian films that offer contemporary commentaries. These letters, written from our standpoint in a time when recording devices have become more accessible and democratic, serve as reflections and trajectories of hopes that were once full of promise but have since diverged in different directions. This collection of films acts as mirrors to a Southeast Asia that was once a landscape to behold—a region of tigers, garudas, elephants, fertile soil, volcanoes, and vast forests, where populations were more closely connected to one another. Through these small yet profound narratives, the films capture the essence of a region that has witnessed both unity and fragmentation.
about the curators
Forum Lenteng is an egalitarian non-profit organization focusing on social and cultural development issues based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Forum Lenteng was founded by communication studies students, artists, researchers, and cultural observers in 2003. The forum was established to develop knowledge on media and art by focusing on production, documentation, research, and open distribution. The development of this knowledge then becomes the foundation for the collective to discuss social issues through art and media. After twenty years of existence, Forum Lenteng has evolved by developing many programs with support from and cooperations with various institutions and communities in Indonesia and internationally.
Philippines / Canada, 2017, 26m
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) is a science fiction documentary that uses the backdrop of Hong Kong and the various ways in which the Filipina migrant worker occupies Central on Sundays.
Philippines, 2021, 17m
This video essay incorporates archival photographs from the American Colonial Era in the Philippines (1898–1946), exploring the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire.
Indonesia / Netherlands, 2022, 59m
Tropic Fever uncovers the racial and spatial imprints of colonial plantations and their entanglement with our contemporary society.
Thailand, 2018, 29m
Through a fictionalized account of the bodiless voices hovering over commercially made presentation and historical strata, A Room with a Coconut View is an essayistic investigation of the politico-aesthetic relation through imagery surface and its netlike-technology apparatuses with a capitalistic-dictatorial-touristy regime as a backdrop.
Singapore, 2024, 15m
“What’s softest…” is a glimpse of queer parenthood in Singapore, where such families are illegitimate under the eyes of the law. Like Kin, the hybrid documentary film combines interview material with a constructed communal space for play and imagination.
