Bringing together moving-image works from across the region, the Australian Cinémathèque presents specially curated programs at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) throughout the 11th Triennial exhibition period. Forming five distinct programs, collectively, the films consider how the passage of time is perceived and altered through the lenses of individual experience and personal history.
See all Screenings & Events and Current & Upcoming Programs
The first of two thematic programs, ‘Future Visions’ (10 January – 16 March 2025) showcases the works of moving-image artists and filmmakers who reflect on the current state of technology, society and cultural identity through the genre of science fiction. Entwining elements of cultural traditions and knowledge with new technologies, many of the selected films explore the slippery space of non-linear time across past, present and future, through the motifs of magical realism and time travel.
Ideas of ancestral memory, society, culture and tradition are also unpacked in ‘Children of Independence: The Rise of Central Asian Cinema’ (12 February – 19 March 2025). In the second of the thematic programs, the effects of the past on the present are writ large, spotlighting current concerns by emerging filmmakers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. These countries gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and the resulting shifts in rule have subsequently offered opportunities for many filmmakers to begin probing previously taboo subjects. In ‘Children of Independence’, the films address corruption, political and religious conservativism, the treatment of women and the influence of rapid cultural, economic and political change on personal and community connections.
These ideas are further explored by three programs surveying the directorial careers of remarkable cinematic voices: Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini (11 January – 8 February 2025), Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi (28 March – 11 May 2025), and senior Taiwan-based Malaysian filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (1 November – 22 December 2024). While distinct in their individual approaches, all three directors question the past, present and future within broader cultural, historical and personal narratives. Their modes of presentation also interrogate the fluidity of the cinematic medium itself, with their practices exploring works as diverse as gallery-led art installations and online streaming series.
Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema delivers a series of events accompanying these screening programs. Australian audiences have a rare opportunity to hear from Andini, Tsai, and Hamaguchi‘s creative collaborators — producer Satoshi Takata and musician-composer Eiko Ishibashi — who discuss their work at the Australian Cinémathèque through an In Conversation series including director Thomas Fairchild and actor Ian Bolt discussing the short film Heel 2024, and writer-director Kamila Andini as she talks about the characters she crafts in her films. Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema also presents a display of Tsai’s single-channel video installation works, and an event in which Ishibashi performs her audiovisual work Gift 2023, which evolved from conversations between the composer and Hamaguchi for whom Ishibashi previously created the soundtrack for Drive My Car 2021.
Future Visions
Throughout cinematic history, ‘the future’ has served as a rich playground for filmmakers to explore the imagined, the taboo and the unknown. Today, anthropocentric concerns, including the accelerated rate of climate change, increased migration and the rapid pace of technological development, have catapulted anxieties about the future of the environment, culture and identity into the present, raising questions about the legacies of humankind.
‘Future Visions’ showcases a diverse selection of works by filmmakers and moving-image artists from Asia and the Pacific who are combining hallmarks of the science-fiction genre with heritage traditions and ancestral stories to reflect on contemporary environmental, political and cultural concerns. Set amid neon-drenched cityscapes, architectural ruins and futuristic worlds, these films variously reject, parody and expand on past ‘techno-orientalist’ tendencies of the dominant European and North American film industries. These Asian and Pacific filmmakers present an array of imagined futures that delve into the realms of postcolonialism, the contemporary diaspora, queer identities and post-humanism.
Despite an emphasis on prefiguring the future, the films featured in this program are as much about memory as speculative thinking. Filmmakers in the region draw from tradition and memory to transgress the constraints of linear time, allowing them to tell stories about the past from a future viewpoint, and to comment on the present. They are also reconfiguring traditional science-fiction narratives, integrating culture and history. By asking ‘what if?’, this suite of films considers what the movement of humanity — both in terms of geography and evolution — means for our environmental future, our personal and cultural identities, and our memories across the region.
Children of Independence: The Rise of Central Asian Cinema
Emerging from years of Soviet Union rule, the rise of cinema in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan since 1991 offers an exciting insight into the region with contemporary filmmakers having much to say about society, culture and tradition. Often unflinching in their approach to difficult and sometimes taboo subjects, the articulate and award‑winning films showcased in ‘Children of Independence: The Rise of Central Asian Cinema’ champion stories of vulnerable and exploited people.
Like many of their Asian and Pacific regional counterparts, Central Asian filmmakers explore the effects of rapid cultural, economic and political change in their work. Embedded in the narratives of many films from Central Asia is an examination of traditional values and customs, and how they apply to the changing contemporary landscape.
In a climate of conservative politics, artists and filmmakers are mindful of subjects that are frowned upon or outright forbidden. In Central Asia, governing bodies set the tone for what is acceptable within film narratives; however, previously taboo topics are slowly emerging in the contemporary filmmaking of the region. In recent years, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have moved closer to functional democratic rule and more open societies, while Uzbekistan and Tajikistan tend toward Soviet-era restriction.
The loosening of cultural taboos and the increased agency of filmmakers to tell their own stories have encouraged a creative cinematic outpouring over the last 20 years. It is a time of growth, and a dynamic moment for independent voices to be...
‘Fierce Visions: Mati Diop and Djibril Diop Mambéty’ presents the works of French–Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop alongside her uncle, Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty. Both auteurs have a unique filmmaking style, pushing the bounds of cinematic language.
Mati Diop began her film career as an actress then later moving into writing and directing. Her recent debut feature Atlantics 2019 was the first film directed by a Black woman to win the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Grand Prix award.
Djibril Diop Mambéty’s two stylish, radical feature films — Touki Bouki 1973 and Hyenas 1992 — are hailed among the greatest triumphs of African cinema.
The free program boasts restored classics alongside films presented in Australia for the first time. Here are five films not to be missed.
Screening this week and upcoming
#1
Atlantics (2009–2019) Ages 12+
When writing her first feature film Atlantics 2019, Mati Diop wanted to explore the impact the treacherous sea voyage between Senegal and Europe had on the African community through a romantic lens. Of this creative process the Diop has said “I hadn’t grown up with any black couple figures worthy of Romeo and Juliet. Through Ada and Souleiman I wanted to relate an impossible love, in the age of rampant capitalism. A love obliterated by injustice, stolen by the ocean”.
Diop’s award-winning first feature film Atlantics 2019 is paired with her short film of the same name. Both combine drama with haunting, supernatural elements which examine these pressures and longings for love, a better life and self-determination.
#2
Hyenas (1992) Ages 15+
Accompanied by a fabulous entourage, musicians who announce her arrival and sporting a golden prosthetic leg, Linguere Ramatou (Ami Diakhate) is a force to be reckoned with. As a young woman Ramatou had to leave her village in disgrace, yet now, in her old age she triumphantly returns a rich woman. The self-important men of the town see her arrival as an opportunity to ingratiate themselves in the hope she can rid them of their financial woes. However, Ramatou comes back home not for redemption, instead she’s seeking revenge. Hyenas is writer/director Djibril Diop Mambéty’s masterwork: an incandescent commentary on class, colonialism, power and powerlessness.
#3
35 Shots of Rum (2008) Ages 18+
Writer/Director Mati Diop’s first foray into filmmaking was starring for acclaimed French director Claire Denis. Diop’s wonderfully subtle performance in 35 Shots of Rum is complimented beautifully by her co-star and Denis regular Alex Decas who plays her father. A radiant and masterful portrayal of relationships and the build up towards the thresholds we may cross – weddings, funerals, retirement – that shift and remake us.
I know that acting has enormously enriched and rendered more concrete my relationship to writing and to my actors but I cannot precisely explain this relationship. My experience working with Claire Denis on 35 rhums has particularly affected me. I wouldn’t know where what she conveyed to me begins or ends. It’s huge. Mati Diop
#4
Le Franc (1994) + The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999) Ages 15+
Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun are two medium-length films brimming with light and captivating characters which chronicle, with Djibril Diop Mambéty’s signature warmth and gentle comedy, the obstacles they face in daily life. They are the first two films by Mambéty intended as a trilogy about the poor titled ‘Tales of Ordinary People’. Mambéty describes the people he wants to capture in these films as “the only truly consistent, unaffected people in the world, for whom every morning brings the same essential question: how to preserve what is essential to themselves”.
#5
Cinema is Magic (2022) Ages 15+
The documentary Cinema is Magic offers a rare insight into the filmmaking process of one of African cinema’s foremost directors – Djibril Diop Mambéty. Featuring an interview with Mambéty alongside clips from his films, the director poetically discusses his deep love of cinema and philosophical approach to life and making art.
Rosie Hays is Associate Curator, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA
The Australian Cinémathèque
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) is the only Australian art gallery with purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. The Australian Cinémathèque at GOMA provides an ongoing program of film and video that you’re unlikely to see elsewhere, offering a rich and diverse experience of the moving image, showcasing the work of influential filmmakers and international cinema, rare 35mm prints, recent restorations and silent films with live musical accompaniment by local musicians or on the Gallery’s Wurlitzer organ originally installed in Brisbane’s Regent Theatre in November 1929.
Featured image: Production still from Le Franc 1994 / Director: Djibril Diop Mambéty / Image courtesy: Waka Films
To celebrate the centenary of the 16mm-gauge film format, ‘Colour Box’ brings together a selection of contemporary and archival 16mm experimental films to highlight the format’s long-standing relationship with abstract cinema. The free screenings are in response to the exhibition ‘Living Patterns: Contemporary Australian Abstraction’ at the Queensland Art Gallery from 23 September 2023 – 11 February 2024.
Free screenings this week & upcoming
Hand-painted explosions of colour, affectionate exchanges between vertical and horizontal lines, and playful dancing silhouettes are all brought to life in magnificent symphonies of abstraction, courtesy of the 16mm film format.
The nostalgia of cinema lies not only in the pictures that we see on screen, but also in the sounds and smells of the mechanical devices that bring the cinematic illusion to life. For filmmakers, projectionists and cinema aficionados, one of the most evocative scents of cinema is the distinctly vinegary fragrance of degrading film emulsion. The reason for this is that, since their inception in the late 1800s, flexible film stocks have used gelatin emulsion (a technology originally developed by the photographic industry) to adhere images to film. Despite the apparent permanency of this alchemical process, from the moment a print is struck, material film — particularly the 35mm and 16mm gauge formats — begins to deteriorate, serving as a fragrant reminder of the fragile nature of material film and traditional cinema.
Dawn Chorus 1979
A few decades after the first 35mm screenings, film manufacturers (charmed by the spectacle of the 35mm format but disenchanted by its high price-tag and bulky weight) began to investigate more accessible and commercially viable formats. This led to the creation, in 1923, of the 16mm gauge — a smaller, lighter and cheaper format developed by Eastman Kodak, which gave emerging filmmakers the opportunity to explore the possibilities of film without the burden of cost. Its affordability and availability made it one of the first democratic film formats, and it quickly found a home among artists, amateur filmmakers and the avant-garde.
Diagonal Symphony 1921
Around this time, the art movements of Modernism, Futurism, Dadaism and Expressionism were fast becoming prevalent in Europe, giving rise to a new wave of creative thought that favoured expression over representation. Intrigued by the ability of the moving image to expand on these contemporary ideas, filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger began to experiment with shapes and forms, often hand-painting 16mm celluloid, which resulted in a new style of experimental filmmaking that would later be known as ‘abstract cinema’.
Kreise (Circles) 1933
Several years later, music and colour became increasingly prominent in this style of filmmaking. Led by pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Len Lye, these early experiments (disguised as cinema advertisements) became spectacular playgrounds for onscreen displays of movement and colour. Filmmakers Mary Ellen Bute and Norman McClaren extended much of the richness of this style of filmmaking into the postwar period, harnessing the undeniable joy of abstraction to provide audiences with a welcome source of visual splendor.
Rainbow Dance 1930
Over time, these experiments in abstraction became more performative, moving the genre further into the realms of repetition and perception. Filmmakers from around the world, such as Hollis Frampton, Malcolm Le Grice, Michael Snow, and Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, used changes in motion, frame rate and camera positioning to purposefully challenge audiences with unexpected visuals and abstract narratives. In the 1970s and 80s, abstract films became even more participatory through the introduction of text, taking the form of visual ‘puzzles’ that would offer new ways to see and experience film. While this style of filmmaking was largely reflexive, it could also be unexpectedly autobiographical, as demonstrated by Barbara Hammer’s 1988 film Endangered, which combines images of the artist with the process of film production itself.
Euclidean Illusions 1979
As abstract cinema continued to evolve, so did the technology around it. The introduction of computer-generated imagery opened never-before-seen dimensions for these onscreen abstractions, moving them in to more expansive, geometric territories. Filmmakers John Whitney and Stan VanDerBeek, who each had a penchant for exploring the slippages between art and technology, were quick to adopt this form of onscreen abstraction, resulting in an array of films filled with intricate patterns and mathematical dreamscapes. This fascination with abstraction and technology would extend long into the 1990s and early noughts, as shown through the work of experimental filmmaker Joost Rekveld.
Although not as prevalent as it once was, and despite the rise of digital technologies, the 16mm format remains an important tool in the development of new ideas and experimental films. Many artists prize the medium for its unique qualities, such as a vivid colour palette and its ability to be drawn on directly — Australian filmmaker Dirk De Bruyn, for instance, continues to incorporate hand-drawn and hand-painted 16mm elements into his films. The kaleidoscopic effects of abstraction have also been used in new and increasingly poignant ways by artists such as Kent Morris to reconstruct built environments through a First Nations lens.
Colourful, playful and disarmingly mesmeric, ‘Colour Box’ offers a unique opportunity to explore the rich history of this chapter in experimental cinema by celebrating its highly expressive and immersive aesthetic on the big screen.
#11, Marey Moiré 1999
Victoria Wareham is Assistant Curator, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA
Colour Box
‘Colour Box: Abstract Cinema’ screens in the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA and the Queensland Art Gallery Lecture Theatre / 24 September 2023 until 4 February 2024.
Living Patterns
‘Living Patterns: Contemporary Australian Abstraction’ is on display in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Gallery (Gallery 3), Gallery 4 & Watermall from 23 September 2023 – 11 February 2024.
The ‘Contemporary Art X Cinema’ free film program at the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane from 23 June – 26 July 2023 showcases films by multi-disciplinary artists whose practices move between the white cube of the gallery and the black box of cinema. From satirical musicals and heart-wrenching biopics to experimental films that push the boundaries of narrative storytelling, here are five films by artists that blur the line between contemporary art and cinema.
#1
A Dream of Wholeness in Parts 2021
2022 Turner Prize-nominee Sin Wai Kin combines visual imagery from traditional Chinese dramaturgy with references to contemporary drag, music and poetry, to create fantastical dreamscapes that deconstruct conventional representations of gender and present alternate states of being. Referring to philosopher Chuang Tzu’s ‘Dream of the Butterfly’, the dreamy visual poem, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts, takes place in a cinematic world where three characters – each played by the artist – contemplate their being-in-the-world. Screens: 8.30pm, Friday 23 June & 1.00pm, Saturday 15 July
#2
Delete Beach 2016
British artist and filmmaker Phil Collins uses photography and video to comment on the fluidity of popular culture and its ability to transcend language, social status and locality. In the experimental short film Delete Beach, Collins engages with the cinematic genre of anime to explore themes relating to social alienation, contemporary technology, and cultural revolution. The film takes place in a dystopian future where carbon-based energy is illegal and follows a young schoolgirl as she joins an anti-capitalist resistance group in an attempt to overthrow a totalitarian regime. Screens: 2.30pm, Wednesday 18 June
#3
Love is a Treasure 2002
UFOs, killers in the corridor and wild wind storms all feature in Finnish artist Eiija-Liisa Ahtila’s five-part episodic film, Love is a Treasure. Part drama, part fantasy, the film brings together the stories of five women, each of whom perceive the world through a unique lens. Using the cinematic qualities of film to convey a sense of the worlds that the women are living in, Ahtila’s visual opus evocatively explores the murky territory between reality and the imagination. Love is a Treasure 2002 will screen from a new 2K digital restoration. Screens: 1.30pm, Sunday 9 July & 3.30pm, Saturday 15 July
#4
Looking for Oum Kulthum 2017
A fresh take on the traditional biopic, Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum tells the story of an Iranian artist and filmmaker living in exile as she attempts to tell the story of the legendary Egyptian singer, Oum Kulthum. Described by Neshat as a film within a film, Looking for Oum Kulthum moves seamlessly between the genres of documentary and fiction to present two separate – but interconnected – storylines, both which highlight the challenges faced by women in a conservative, male dominated society. Screens: 1.00pm, Sunday 25 June & 6.00pm, Wednesday 19 July
#5
Hello Dankness 2022
In this darkly satirical suburban musical, Australian art duo Soda Jerk’s latest film Hello Dankness brings together hundreds of film samples to make contemporary commentary on the mythologies, farce and lore surrounding the American political landscape between 2016 and 2020. A glorious blend of political satire, zombie apocalypse, and Greek tragedy, Hello Dankness is a jarring reality-check that highlights the contagion-like influence of internet culture and memetics on contemporary society. Screens: 1.30pm, Saturday 1 July.
Victoria Wareham is Assistant Curator, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA
‘Contemporary Art X Cinema’ free film program screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA from 23 June to 26 July 2023.
The Australian Cinémathèque
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) is the only Australian art gallery with purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. The Australian Cinémathèque at GOMA provides an ongoing program of film and video that you’re unlikely to see elsewhere, offering a rich and diverse experience of the moving image, showcasing the work of influential filmmakers and international cinema, rare 35mm prints, recent restorations and silent films with live musical accompaniment by local musicians or on the Gallery’s Wurlitzer organ originally installed in Brisbane’s Regent Theatre in November 1929.
