Monday 20/01/2015
In late June 2024, artists and filmmakers from across the world journeyed to the Thai Film Archive for the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar. Curated by CREAM’s Prof. May Adadol Ingawanij, together with Dr Julian Ross, Head of Film Programming and Distribution, EYE Filmmuseum, and CREAM Associate, the seminar was held in Asia for the first time in its history. Here, CREAM PhD researcher and artist Nadia Yahlom shares an extract from her forthcoming essay reflecting on her own experience and its enduring impact as a collective, communal encounter.
We’ve just started a tour of the Thai Film Archive หอภาพยนตร์. As always, after flying, a migraine is gnawing its way through my internal wiring and pummelling at my right temple to get out. It’s a sort of spirit possession – it doesn’t let me speak, walk or see much, it will need a little more time to exorcise itself. The others in my group drink in the anecdotes about dubbing, translating and hand-splicing film and the evolution of Thai cinema whilst I stare at the immaculately rendered veins on the forearm of a waxwork of Thai-Parsi director Rattana Pestonji, the first filmmaker in the country to use 35mm and gain international recognition. We pour out into the sunshine, the intense humidity of monsoon season a world away from the dark, air-conditioned little rooms of the museum. I feel I have stumbled into Westworld. Film sets surround us. A steam locomotive, frozen in time, is being driven by Jean Gabin from Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938). Statues of Edward Muybridge and Charlie Chaplin look on.
We’re led across to the sprawling cinematheque to hear an introductory address by Flaherty co-curators Julian Ross and May Adadol Ingawanij. The external architecture apparently references a phutthawat, the part of the Buddhist temple complex which is dedicated to the Buddha. The inside is all floodlit spaces, high ceilings, polished stone, stained glass, curved forms, secret corners and pilgrimages to the past. I’ve already spotted someone in the room I have met and worked with in London before, Palestinian filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky, and I’m pleased to see a familiar face, but the sight and sound of so many erudite, interesting, beautifully attired people takes me aback. I imagined a little group of us, a bit rough around the edges, navigating old Thai films and discussing books we’ve read, work we’ve made and ideas that have occurred to us. This looks glossier. I wonder now how “American” the whole experience is going to be and brace myself for anticipated networking, something I’ve never liked or been able to do with any success. Thinking about how American things are or are not will, it turns out, be a defining feature of the whole experience for me and – I believe – for many others too.
The creature clambers up my spine, digging its nails in as it notches its way back up to my head but I’ve left all my usual amulets and potions at home. The address begins. Julian explains his vision for the congress, followed by May. Julian and May are the perfect pair, riffing off each other’s different energies easily: both undeniably cool, radiating intelligence, approachability and warmth. His smile broad and encouraging, hers perfectly punctuating her deadpan humour. Jemma Desai, who will curate the forthcoming Congress is up next. The three of them seem to represent a very welcome stewardship, a move in the right direction for an organisation which has seen its fair share of controversy as it struggles to cast off associations with its namesake Robert Flaherty, known for his 1922 film Nanook of the North. The film, considered by many to be a landmark in documentary cinema, features a man called Allakariallak (renamed Nanook by Flaherty) and a community of Inuit people and members of Flaherty’s family, pretending to be Inuit. Flaherty said of his project that what he wanted to “show is the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible, before the white man (Flaherty family excepted) has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well.” He does this by staging empowering scenes of indigenous life, like the sight of Allakariallak mistaking a vinyl record for food and trying to eat it. The extent to which The Flaherty seminar is embarrassed or not by this legacy is unclear.
Flaherty as a meeting of film and film-inspired people has been running for almost seventy years now. The idea is that a group is brought together and over a period of a few days, deep-dives into the work of a small number of artists and filmmakers in a pretty intensive way (six eight hour days of consistently watching films and talking about them), without being given any context about the films or knowing about the programme prior to screening. We’re told that for this seminar, “non-preconception” and the idea of being able “to commune” with one another, with the spirit world, and with unreckoned pasts, is key. The influence of Buddhist and animist belief and of reincarnation and resurrection (both in the mystical and in the philosophical sense) seems omnipresent.
The only films I watch these days are footage from Palestine. Arriving at The Flaherty, it is nine months into the genocide in Gaza, a period in which a full life could have emerged, but in which so many thousands have instead been eviscerated. Every single day, and most nights too, I have watched feet and hands gathered up into plastic bags. Hollowed out children’s skulls. Bodies in tatters, flesh hanging off bone and sinew, disembodied limbs crumbling, blackened and powdery. Whole life worlds destroyed in a seemingly bottomless pit of bloodlust. Kindness matters now, not polite, affected kindness but real kindness, the precursor and seed of radical love, which I fight and want to leave space for, even as my mind and body sometimes melt into rage and sorrow and despair. Radical love has been taught to me again and again in Palestine. I find it here too in Thailand, at The Flaherty.
Many of us are jet-lagged, but we are all excited for what May and Julian have in store for us for the first film of the programme. We’re directed to a large amphitheatre overlooked on one side by a latticed wall which is open to the elements and on the other side by a spaceship inhabited by an ape-man, props from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2009 film Primitive. Bats swoop around us. An orchestra begins to play music. Live Thai dubbing begins. The magic of cinema metamorphoses the space. I think about the time I went to see a alien cum Western movie in Richmond, Virginia, accompanied by an old Wurlitzer organ. Then, as now, the soundtrack shifted the atmosphere into something closer to a religious experience. The air thrums. We are ready to commune.
Thamrong Rujanaphand’s 1959 Tamone Prai (Savage Jungle), a Thai interpretation of King Kong, is shown to us without subtitles. The violence is cartoonish, the dialogue stripped back. We are split up into breakout groups to discuss. We talk about how the film was made in Southern Thailand and features some of the Malay-origin Muslim population that live in the region and who are now subject to increasingly authoritarian treatment by the Thai regime. Lots of people find the film really funny. I find it disturbing that the ape is associated with a community that continues to be oppressed to this day. Some in my group disagree and I like that. Flaherty welcomes debate and lets you dissent, perhaps even welcomes this. The blessing and the curse of Flaherty is that you are constantly thrust into discussions with people who might be your new favourite artist (including artists programmed throughout the seminar) but you are treated as equals, which of course – you are. That isn’t always the case in arts spaces where the divide between visionary/auteur and audience member/disciple can be clearly delineated and constantly inscribed by lines (real or invisible) that cannot be crossed.
Flaherty works best when it curates more inclusive spaces like this where little groups of makers and writers, artists and curators, thinkers and doers, can really get into it, without the need to sound too intelligent or formulate our thoughts ahead of time. Opportunities to gather in unexpected ways generate unexpectedly poignant moments of collective solidarity. Whether I like or dislike certain films, everything is worth thinking and talking about, and it’s fascinating to try to imagine why certain film combinations have been curated in the way they have by May and Julian. The curation feels much more thoughtful than in many festivals I’ve been to. It’s almost a work in itself trying to unravel and decode their thought processes, which remain closely guarded throughout the congress and contribute to a sense of added mystery and wonder.
I see a lot of fantastic films, some blistering, horrifying denunciations of imperialism and state violence, some quiet, gentle contemplations on overlapping elements of different life, death, rebirth and the space between. I think a lot during the seminar about how women, particularly working-class women of the global south, are not only some of the most vulnerable to violence – whether state violence or violence in the home – but remain absent from so many films about political struggle which centre the violence meted out and suffered by men. The programme consistently platforms women makers, both emerging and veteran. Many of the women artists that show their work or who I talk to throughout the process remind me of the importance of listening, rather than formulating my opinion straightaway and imposing it on others, arguably a less patriarchal, certainly a less Western, way of existing, both as an artist and as a person.
What stands out for me, in the end, is not always those moments of silent reverie but of conversations before and after films. The spirit of camaraderie and friendship that determines how we all navigate being in this kind of cinematic boot camp together. Acts of care and concern for one another’s wellbeing. Conversations with Hope, Jin, Dew, Mateo, Ivor, Saeed, Chanasorn, Vinay, Jules, Philippa, Vik, Pin Pin, Sriwhana and so many others. Questions about each other’s families and upbringings, our ideas and values, that are just as – if not more – important as those about the work we make or write about. Throughout the process, I think a lot about the Western ego and how it forces us into certain ways of being and interacting that, for me, often feel superficial, individualistic, opportunistic and rooted in the accumulation of money, status and power. I have a sense in this space that – no doubt led by the extraordinary kindness of so many of the Thai artists, curators, filmmakers and individuals that I encounter during the seminar – we’re able to operate differently here.
Being together from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, eating and then often drinking together into the early hours, we are able to feel each other out, intuit meaning from both silences and from words, and to relate as souls who exist in different parts of a shared world rather than people constantly on the make. Even where disagreements (creative, political) arise, the emphasis seems always to be on what we gain from coming together, and the result is that I feel enriched by so many conversations with people I meet there. I realise how alone I’ve often felt whilst away from Palestine, witnessing it unfold, and how healing it is to be amongst people who care, about the world and about each other.
There’s a lot of talk about anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism throughout the seminar – how, no matter how hard we try – we cannot escape the ways in which it has devastated, continues to devastate, our lifeworlds. Colonial violence, American and Zionist in particular, looms large in the programme – we see the various ways in which it is felt and continues to destroy lives and landscapes, a chimaera resurrecting again and again, even after it seems to have been slain and buried. We see too the ways in which both human and non-humans – supernatural entities, plants, animals, weather phenomena – reemerge from its devastating grip, seeking power and freedom as rooted in deeper and more cyclical concepts of time. Diaspora artists contribute fascinating perspectives to these meditations, reflecting often poignantly on dispossession, estrangement and belonging.
After Flaherty ends, I feel a sense of loss. That it’s over. That real life beckons, even as I long to see my daughter again, who I’ve never been away from for more than a few hours. Four of us go to Bangkok together for a final send-off. Alone for a little while in Wat Pho, save for the company of cats and some monks and nuns, I lie down on the ground and pray that I remember all I’ve learned, and that I get to see some of the people I’ve communed with again. On my final night in Thailand, eating flowers cooked with glass noodles and tiny fried fish with new friends as the rain crashes down on the tin roof above us, I realise that even if we never cross paths again, being able to commune in this moment, in the place, at this time, has been wondrous. When I get home, I sit down in front of my laptop with a glass of Thai iced tea and try to drink in memories of the archive. Mateo and Dew have sent me some of their (fantastic) films to watch – the threads binding us across space and time renew.
Thank you very much to the Geoffrey Petts Scholarship and the Graduate School for supporting my trip, to May and to Julian for curating this life-changing experience, to all the staff at The Flaherty who helped make it possible, and all those at the Thai Archive for the warmth with which they allowed us into their magical space: ขอบคุณค่ะ.
A full screening programme is available here. For additional commentaries on the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar, see Tank Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Film Quarterly, Taiwan Film and Audio Visual Institute (in Chinese), and Material (in Korean). An extended version of this essay will be published in the Flaherty catalogue due in 2025.