Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinemas in Southeast Asia ed. by May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay (review)

This edited volume addresses the simultaneous emergence in the late 1990s of independent cinema both as a practice and as a discourse in the countries of the Southeast Asian region. Whilst taking into account the complications of doing so, most of these chapters adopt national starting points in their analysis of independent cinema. They consider Indonesia (Chris Chong Chan Fui), Malaysia (chapters by Hassan Abdul Muthalib, Benjamin McKay, and Gaik Cheng Khoo), the Philippines (chapters by John Torres and Alexis A. Tioseco), Singapore (chapters by Vinita Ramani Mohan, and Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde), Thailand (chapters by Chalida Uabumrungjit, Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, and May Adadol Ingawanij), Timor-Leste (Angie Bexley), and Vietnam (Mariam B. Lam).

In the same year that saw the appearance of this book, David C.L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto’s Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention was also published. That volume’s central concern was to explore the ways in which social practices and ideologies have been represented, promoted, challenged, opposed, or erased in Southeast Asian films. With respect to the close attention given to the social and political contexts of these films, and their implication in the global flows of culture and capital, the two books are broadly similar. Each book, in fact, has a chapter on Martyn See’s political documentaries on Singapore. However, much of the volumes’ coverage is also different. Lim’s and Yamamoto’s book presents chapters that discuss both independent and mainstream films, across several genres. The cinema of Burma/Myanmar (Jane M. Ferguson), Cambodia (Boreth Ly), and Laos (Panivong Norindr) — not treated in Ingawanij’s and McKay’s book — are discussed in Lim and Yamamoto. For those countries covered in both books, the chapters in Lim and Yamamoto discuss different issues and concerns, including for instance the Chinese in Indonesia (Abidin Kusno); patriotism and race in Malaysia (chapters by David C.L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto); film collectives in the Philippines (Rolando B. Tolentino); memories, activism, and new media in Singapore (chapters by Kenneth Paul Tan and Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi); migrants and nostalgic parodies in Thailand (Pattana Kitiarsa); and diaspora and war in Vietnam (Vo Hong Chuong-Dai).

The fifteen substantive chapters of Ingawanij’s and McKay’s book are framed by three separate but related overarching concerns. Some highlight the film-maker’s place within relations of production shaped by the state, global capital, transnational cultural networks, and media-technological changes. Others focus on the diffusion and circulation of films and their discourses in contexts that include the national and the transnational, as well as alternatives to mainstream distributors and exhibitors such as niche festivals and piracy circuits. The rest deal mainly with the relationships between cinematic experience and national(ist) formations.

The chapters are organized into three sections. The first, under the heading “Action”, features five chapters that attempt to document the pioneering efforts of individuals and collectives that produced, distributed, or curated independent films and videos in circumstances that were not often hospitable. These include chapters on Martyn See, whose low-budget short films on political dissidents and dissent in Singapore have met with investigation and censorship on the part of the authorities (Mohan); John Badalu, who organizes a queer film festival in a largely conservative country with a huge Muslim population (Chong); Malaysian-Indian film-makers who, because they produce Tamil-language rather than Malay-language films, are officially excluded from the category of Malaysian film-makers and from access to the benefits that it entails (Muthalib); Thai independent film-makers — supported by the film schools, festival mechanism, and film archive — who struggle to create a viable space that is independent of the mainstream industry (Chalida); and John Torres, who attempts to distribute his independent film through the deeply entrenched institution of film piracy in the Philippines (Torres).

The second section of the book...