As part of the ‘Introduction : Cinema for The New World’ exhibition project, this program will screen two films from the 1964 Afro-Asia Film Festival (AAFF), one of the important articulations of Bandung's anti-colonial spirit. This screening program is part of an early stage of revisiting the festival in tracing back how the anti-colonial and anti-imperialism struggle for Asians and Africans at that time manifested in cinema. At the same time, this program tried to embrace with the political dynamic of the 1964 AAFF which is the Sino-Soviet split. Can we find the possible cinematic Third-Worldism from that political rift?
The first film, ‘Law of Baseness’ (1962) made by Soviet director Alexandr Medvedkin tells the story of the struggle of the Congo people. The film received strong protests from the Congo delegation and AAFF’s judges, and didn’t win any awards. As almost all films from African delegations were hard to impossible to find in archives, we will look back at the possibilities of African cinema by tracing in what context the protest was expressed and why.
Curator and scholar Enoka Ayemba will help us to imagine and speculate the legacy of anti-colonial African cinema from the Bandung era.
The second film, ‘Red Detachment of Women’ (1961, Xie Jin) from China won the Bandung Award for the best film category. The film was a commissioned film to celebrate the ten years of the formation of the People’s Republic of China. In the form of melodrama containing socialist values, this revolutionary realism tells the story of revolutionary history and raises revolutionary women heroes by putting women at the forefront of collective struggles. It is interesting that the three other winning films also focus their narratives on female subjects, which place women as a subject category with clear legitimacy and agency.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Echo Xuedan Tang, the founder of CiLENS, a Berlin-based film curation collective of Chinese independent films.
Program
1pm – 2pm: Film Screening Law of Baseness (1962, Alexandr Medvedkin)
2pm – 3pm: Discussion with Enoka Ayemba
3 – 3.30pm: Break
3.30 – 5.30pm: Film Screening of Red Detachment of Women (1961, Xie Jin)
5.30 – 6.30pm: Discussion with Echo Tang
Synopsis
Law of Baseness | Alexander Medvedkin | 50 min, 1962, Soviet
An analysis of de-colonization in Africa, focusing on the efforts of the Soviet Union to combat capitalist imperialism throughout Africa, but with a particular focus on the Congo in the wake of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination.
Red Detachment of Women | Xie Jin | 1 h 50 m, 1961, People’s Republic of China
The Red Detachment of Women is set in the Hainan archipelago in South China during the second civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang nationalists in the 1927-1937 period. The film tells the story of a girl named Xiong Hua who becomes a slave to an tyrannical landlord named Baitan. At the Baitan house, Xiong Hua was subjected to a series of tortures, so she made several attempts to escape, but failed. Xiong Hua was later rescued by Hong when she was about to be sold by Batian as a sex slave. Hong is a male communist member of the CCP who disguises himself as a wealthy merchant from overseas China. Hong bought Xiong Hua to let go. After her release, Xiong Hua chose to go join the first female Red Army group and join the struggle against the local militia and aristocratic landlords who stood in for the Kuomintang nationalists.
