What is the Role of Queer Cinema When the Streets Are Burning?

What role can queer cinema play when societies are confronting political crises? And how might film programming become a practice of collective care rather than cultural consumption? In this blog post, Rizky Rahad, an Indonesian filmmaker, programmer, researcher, and co-founder of the Bali-based queer cinema collective QAMERAD, reflects on his presentation at the Eye International Conference on The Future of Film Programming and draws on his research into queer cinema, anti-colonial film histories, and community-led film programming in Southeast Asia.

When I arrived in Amsterdam for the Eye International Conference on The Future of Film Programming, I carried with me a deceptively simple question: what is the role of queer cinema when the streets are burning?

It was the same question that had haunted QAMERAD (our Bali-based queer cinema collective organising guerrilla screenings and community-led workshops) just months earlier. In August 2025, mass protests erupted across Indonesia after parliament approved extravagant housing allowances for its members while ordinary people struggled through a deepening cost-of-living crisis. In Jakarta, police violence killed a young motorcycle taxi driver, Affan Kurniawan, transforming public outrage into calls for regime change. By the time demonstrations reached Denpasar, where QAMERAD is based, our monthly guerrilla screening was due to take place only a few blocks away from the protests. Some of us joined the demonstrations. Others became volunteer medics. Yet, as evening fell, we still gathered to watch films. It felt almost absurd.

Could watching queer films become a retreat from political urgency? Or might cinema, if activated differently, become part of the infrastructure that sustains collective struggle?

These questions formed the basis of my presentation, Guerrilla Queer Screenings as ‘Rebellious Worldmaking’, which explored how our collective has gradually shifted from understanding screenings as cultural events toward imagining them as spaces where communities rehearse different ways of living together. The presentation drew on the rediscovery of Turang (1957)––a long-lost anti-colonial film about Indonesian villagers resisting Dutch occupation––the forgotten Afro-Asian history of Third Cinema rooted in Bandung, and our collaboration with Taman 65, a Bali-based community dedicated to preserving the memory of the 1965 anti-communist massacres. My presentation argued that queer cinema is not merely about representation, but about building relationships of care capable of surviving political rupture.

What surprised me most, however, was not presenting these ideas. It was discovering how many people, working in radically different political contexts, were asking remarkably similar questions. Throughout the conference, film programming repeatedly appeared not as a matter of selecting films, but as a question of infrastructure.

“I realised that many of us were wrestling with the same problem, despite speaking from vastly different geographies. How do we continue to imagine futures while living inside prolonged crises?”

Rizky Rahad

Anastasiya Verlinska, director of Ukraine’s LINOLEUM Animation Festival, reflected on programming films during the ongoing war in Ukraine, asking how programmers should respond when audiences arrive carrying grief, displacement and exhaustion rather than simply curiosity. Instead of assuming stable spectatorship, she described programming as an ethical negotiation with uncertainty itself. Similarly, Jamil Fiorino-Habib, a researcher at the University of Groningen presenting on the Palestine Film Institute, discussed the institute’s work in imagining archives that remain mobile, collaborative and politically alive rather than confined within national institutions. 

Both presentations challenged the idea that programming begins with films; instead, it begins with the conditions under which communities are able to gather at all.

Listening to these presentations, I realised that many of us were wrestling with the same problem, despite speaking from vastly different geographies. How do we continue to imagine futures while living inside prolonged crises?

The conference itself seemed organised around this question. Rather than treating film heritage as a static archive awaiting preservation, many speakers approached programming as a living practice capable of reshaping social relations in the present. The conference introduction described programming as something in constant motion, increasingly attentive to queer cinema, decolonial practice, collaborative authorship and audience participation. In a world marked by political instability, it suggested, the role of programmers is itself changing.

That shift resonated deeply with QAMERAD’s own trajectory. Since founding the collective in 2024, we have organised monthly guerrilla screenings across Bali, pairing queer films from Indonesia and across the world with discussions, workshops, and collective exercises. Our programmes have ranged from Queer as Folk/lore, which explored folklore and spirituality as queer cinematic strategies, to Takjilicious, which reclaimed Ramadan as a space for queer gathering, and more recently screenings that brought together Turang (1957) and Natasha Tontey’s Garden Amidst the Flame (2022). We are part of a growing transnational ecology of film collectives—from queer screening groups in Southeast Asia to community cinemas and mobile film initiatives elsewhere—that treat cinema not simply as exhibition but as infrastructure for organising.

Yet over time we realised that the films themselves were only part of the work. The more significant labour happened before and after the projector was switched on: negotiating venues, sharing meals, transporting equipment, comforting anxious first-time attendees, building trust with local communities, ensuring everyone returned home safely, and maintaining relationships long after the credits rolled. The screening was never simply the event. It became an excuse for assembling a temporary commons. 

Several presentations echoed this understanding. Iris Elezi, representing the Albanian Cinematheque, described an initiative in Tirana that approached the neighbourhood cinema as community infrastructure rather than merely an exhibition venue. Timmy Chih-Ting Chen, a scholar at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, reflected on co-programming in Hong Kong as a response to censorship and shrinking public space, arguing that community screenings could reimagine cinemas as spaces of collective care. Casa de Lava, a collective-run rural initiative in Catalonia, similarly proposed film programming as political practice through shared meals, walking, conversation and slow encounters rather than spectacular events.

Although our contexts differ enormously, I recognised something familiar. Programming was increasingly being understood as social choreography. Not simply deciding what audiences watch, but creating the conditions through which different relationships become possible.

This also reshaped how I thought about archives. Much of my presentation revisited the rediscovery of Turang and Indonesia’s forgotten contribution to the Afro-Asian genealogy of Third Cinema. The disappearance of this history after the 1965 military coup and the ensuing anti-communist mass killings, which claimed up to a million lives and ushered in Suharto’s New Order dictatorship, did not simply erase films; it severed political imaginations, disconnecting generations from earlier traditions of solidarity. Recovering these works therefore becomes less about nostalgia than reopening futures that had once been violently foreclosed.

Again, this concern echoed throughout the conference. Presentations on Iranian diasporic archives, Palestinian film infrastructures, colonial film collections, Turkish programming initiatives and Berlin’s SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA all treated archives as unfinished political projects rather than repositories of completed histories. Across these discussions, preservation mattered precisely because archives could be reactivated through new encounters, new publics and new forms of hospitality. Perhaps what united these projects was a shared refusal to treat programming as neutral. Programmers do not simply inherit histories. They participate in producing them.

This became especially clear during conversations about decolonial programming. Several speakers questioned how festivals, archives and funding structures continue to determine which films from the Global South become internationally legible while others remain invisible. Rather than simply demanding greater inclusion within existing institutions, they proposed programming itself as a way of unsettling inherited hierarchies of knowledge, circulation and visibility.

Coming from Indonesia, this conversation felt particularly urgent. The history of Indonesian cinema has long been narrated through the lens of the New Order, while earlier anti-colonial traditions remain fragmented or forgotten. Likewise, contemporary queer cinema from Southeast Asia often enters international circulation only when it satisfies recognisable narratives of identity, repression or trauma. What gets programmed frequently determines what becomes imaginable.

Programming, then, is never merely logistical. It is epistemological. It decides which worlds become visible.

One of the unexpected gifts of the conference was discovering that many programmers were already expanding the very definition of programming itself. Across the two days, discussions repeatedly moved beyond screenings toward education, workshops, meals, archives, performances, walking, citizen archivists, collaborative research and community organising. Film became only one element within much broader ecosystems of care.

I left Amsterdam thinking less about programming films than about building communities. Perhaps this is where queer cinema still has something distinctive to offer.

In my presentation, I borrowed the phrase “rebellious worldmaking” from Sudanese writer Leena Habiballa to describe the quiet labour that sustains movements beyond moments of spectacular revolt. Revolutions are remembered through images of barricades, clashes and martyrs. Yet every uprising also depends upon less visible practices: cooking, tending wounds, finding shelter, maintaining friendships, imagining futures worth struggling toward. Queer worldmaking begins precisely in these often-overlooked acts of care.

Looking back, I realise this idea quietly threaded through much of the conference. Whether discussing Ukrainian cinemas, Palestinian archives, rural film initiatives, diasporic collections, neighbourhood screenings, or queer memory – many presenters were ultimately asking the same question.

How do we build the conditions that allow communities not only to survive crises, but to continue imagining beyond it?

Perhaps this is the future of film programming. Not simply selecting films. But cultivating the social infrastructures through which other worlds become imaginable.

In uncertain political times, programming may be less about preserving cinema than about preserving our collective capacity to dream together.