Legacies That Empower: The Enduring Spirit of a Forgotten Festival

“While experience is infinite, the vast majority of experience lies latent. Few images ever arise from it. In our age, those that do arise tend to be selected, or unfolded, by political and economic interests that deem them to be useful as information. Nevertheless, anyone can unfold any aspect of experience to become a public image. Artists (and others) do so in order to allow other aspects of experience to circulate, before they enfold back into the matrix of history.” - Laura Marks, Hanan Al Cinema

The Afro-Asian Film Festival (AAFF) took place in Tashkent (1958), Cairo (1960) and Jakarta (1964). Largely omitted from mainstream film history, the festival’s impact echoes through the contemporary cinematic languages of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Its omission from the film canon has rendered us unaware of how much we owe to this gathering, and to those who kept its ideals evolving towards a cinema from and for the global majority. As contemporary film workers contending with the role of cinema and festival spaces as zones of political self-expression, I think we have much to learn from rediscovering how these predecessors organized to reconcile ideological vision with practical action.

The festival's inaugural edition took place three years after the 1955 Bandung Conference, where 29 Afro-Asian leaders from newly independent and decolonizing countries gathered to challenge the legacy of colonialism. As part of the emerging Third Worldist movement, cinema was recognized by Bandung conference leaders as a crucial tool for dismantling imperialism and racism while promoting “the national cultures of the people” (Communique,167). The Afro-Asian Film Festival thus emerged as an alternative to the European film circuit, where delegates discussed co-productions, business agreements, and gained exposure to each other's national film industries.

Years later, in 1969, Argentine filmmakers Solanas and Getino conceptualized Third Cinema as one of liberation and opposition to both Hollywood's industrial model and capitalism's co-option of auteur cinema. While Third Cinema histories are often thought to begin with Solanas and Getino’s manifesto, “the essential debates about revolutionary aesthetics and cinema's political role had already emerged in the AAFF" (Razlogova, 9).

Taking place during the Cold War, the AAFF aspired to maintain non-alignment and peaceful coexistence (Communique,164). However, the practical difficulties of independence from Second or First World influence were revealed during the festival's organization. Holding the first edition in Tashkent—the capital city of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet country—was a direct response to Asian Film Week held in Beijing just one year earlier, revealing the impact of the Sino-Soviet rivalry and the USSR's desire to participate in Third World discourse. As a result, "The Soviet spectacle of the Bandung spirit took precedence over viewing and debating cinema" (Razlogova, 3).

The 1960 Cairo edition faced similar tensions. While Egyptian president Nasser preached socialist rhetoric publicly, the festival was capitalist in execution, featuring competitions, red carpets, and promoting Hollywood production practices that led to emerging Afro-Asian film industries to withdraw participation.

In 1964, Jakarta's festival adhered most closely to Bandung principles, presenting an uncompromising program promoting "tricontinental solidarity in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle" (Razlogova, 7). However, when audiences opted for Hollywood films that dominated the theatres over the militant liberation cinema of Asia, Africa and Latin America, organizers Bachtiar Siagian (filmmaker) and Utami Suryadarma (women’s activist) formed PAPFIAS (Action Committee Against Imperialist American Films) with fellow filmworkers. They rallied “cinema owners, distributors, youth groups, unions, and journalists” (Pasaribu, AJ) to boycott Hollywood productions and uphold revolutionary films—a movement that rapidly spread throughout both urban and rural Indonesia, transforming their festival work into effective nationwide direct action.

Despite drawbacks, these gatherings offered essential ideological and physical spaces for Third World communing, leading to numerous co-productions between previously disconnected national film industries. They laid groundwork for conversations about infrastructural, linguistic, and logistical needs while encouraging cross-border exchange. This discourse of "collective spirit not common method" among "discordant comrades" (Pasaribu, AJ) was unprecedented in its approach to achieving cinematic sovereignty for participating nations.

What became evident across the three editions was the critical role of filmmakers' voices in successfully implementing practical and structural transformations. The 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana—Latin America's official integration into the solidarity network—shifted leadership from governments to filmmakers, who expanded their roles to address aesthetic, structural, and distribution concerns. In 1969, Argentine filmmakers Solanas and Getino published "Towards a Third Cinema," building upon foundations laid by the AAFF circuit.

The films and filmmakers in DOXA’s 2025 Curated Program embody the ideals of the Afro-Asian Cultural Network and the Third Cinema Movement. For Sara Gomez, Omar Amiralay, and Suliman Abde lNour, their work transcended filmmaking to establish cinematic models that were integral to the "decolonisation of culture" (Octavio and Solanas, 1969) and national development—even when they faced censorship, exile, and persecution.

Direct calls to action in Mi Aporte, Plate of Sardines, and Africa, the Jungle, Drums and Revolution, rally viewers toward change and active participation. These works transform images into analytical tools: Within each film, meta-cinematic events unfold, revealing the potential of images to expose the spirit of liberatory struggles.

Commissioned by Cuba's Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, Sara Gomez’s Mi Aporte records conversations between federation women, then screens this footage to female factory workers who transform the theatre into an assembly space. These workers' critique of the federation's unrealistic portrayal of gender equality resulted in the film's censorship.

In Plate of Sardines, Omar Amiralay follows filmmaker Mohamed Malas through the rubble of Quneitra after Israeli aggression. Reflecting on his earlier work The Night, filmed there seven years prior, Malas laments: "If I had known that Quneitra would be destroyed, I would have preferred to live and die in it rather than turn it into an image in a film."

Abdel Nour's Africa, the Jungle, Drums and Revolution transforms drawings and descriptions by Russian children and adults into a vehicle for exposing the inherent racism in Soviet imaginaries of Africa. After returning from the USSR, he extended his analytical approach to cinematic expression and literacy throughout Sudan by founding the Sudanese Film Group—a collective created to secure artistic freedom outside government control while nurturing national cinema—until Omar El Bashir's military coup dismantled both the collective and Sudanese cinema entirely.

Building a relationality between the AAFF, Third Cinema and the films embodying their legacy reveals that the path to cinematic sovereignty and solidarity is cumulative. Failure is a necessary building block for future progress and cooperation. These "failures" possess a kineticism—motion occurs and momentum builds, regardless of how long outcomes take to materialize.

Much like the climates that gave rise to the AAFF and sparked the Third Cinema Movement, our current moment—where dominant festival spaces conflate political expression with polemic attacks—witnesses renewed and growing demands for a transformed mode of operation. If the enduring legacy of both cinema movements teaches us anything, it is that when filmmakers collectively and materially engage in structural actions, taking the reins to elevate standards and challenge the status quo, major cinematic shifts become possible.

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Our guest curated shorts screen on Friday, May 2nd at 6:00 PM, at VIFF's Lochmaddy Studio Theatre. For tickets, click here.

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Special thanks to the research, generosity and support of:

Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu, Elena Razlogova, Bunga Siagian, Rugun Sirait, Ahmed Refaat Bahgat, Ana Isabel Fernández, Luis Gutiérrez Arias and Anisa Hosseinnezhad.

Sources

Fattaleh, Nadine. Dear Omar. World Records, vol. 8.

Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference. [online]. In: Asia-Africa speak from Bandung. Jakarta: Indonesia. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 1955. pp. 161-169.

Getino, Octavio, and Fernando Solanas. Towards A Third Cinema. Tricontinental Magazine, 1969.

Marks, Laura U. Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. The MIT Press, 2015.

Kossaifi, Clara. Cairo’s First International Film Festival: African-Asian Solidarity, Modernity and Counter-Cultural Projects in the Age of Nasser. American University of Beirut, 2021. 

Pasaribu, Adrian Jonathan. Close Encounters of Third World Cinemas: The Afro-Asian Film Festival, 1957-1964. University of Amsterdam.

Price, Yasmina. Shooting the Cuban Revolution. Lux Magazine. 

Razlogova, Elena. Cinema in the Spirit of Bandung: The Afro-Asian Film Festival Circuit, 1957–1964, 1st Edition ed., Routledge.

Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting, Algiers, December 5–14, 1973. Black Camera 2, no. 1 (2010): 155–65.