Crisis, Conflict, Commune.
Seng Savunthara — Thursday, 20 August 2025
Photo © Thai Film Archive.
At the Critical Film Writing Workshop organized by the Thai Film Archive, held from 7 to 10 August, Alyssandra and I presented a case study about our work: a self-reflection on the transnational ethos of the magazine and the dialogues emerging from writings about Southeast Asian cinema.
As a publication based in Cambodia, I can speak about the Cambodian-Thailand conflict only in the hangover of the fighting. Even so, it’s a threshold not to be crossed lightly. It’s much safer to conform to the dominant anti-Thai sentiment, as our politics of shame works on an overdrive against silence or questioning of authority.
On the eve of my arrival at the Thai Film Archive, news broke that another Thai soldier stepped on another landmine near the border, while eighteen Cambodian soldiers remained captive in Thailand. The air weighed on me as I slipped through the cracks to a gathering at a Thai cultural venue, an act equivalent to treachery in the eyes of many Cambodians.
Regardless of the circumstances, I could sense the curiosity and affirmation of the participants regarding film writing. As we spoke about Alexis Tioseco’s letter to Nika Bohinc—equal parts love letter to her and to Filipino cinema—I started to wonder if individuals from warring tribes could have meaningful dialogues under our sociopolitical schizophrenia. I remember having intense anxieties navigating between the editorial decisions, crises, and any potential fallouts as one of the countries for the next issue is Thailand. Like others at the workshop, I wondered about why we choose to work in the confines of film writing, its necessity to be discussed and exchanged in a time like this.
However, using terms like “in a time like this” risks the absolute. Once again, we’re at a crossroads of a political and military impasse. The need to engage critically with other writers without being hijacked by political dramas is absolutely crucial.
It brings me to the conversations that MARG1N as a film publication wishes to foster across the region. By pairing Southeast Asian countries and their cinemas, our goal is to rethink, reconceptualize, and rediscover movies in relation to our regional neighbors and communicate beyond what opportunistic politicians or propagandas have devised for us. We encourage and facilitate the construction of articles, cinemas, discourses, and bridges instead of allowing the shallow competition to erase our shared humanity or numb our ability to navigate across destructive boundaries of nationalism. Beyond the financial value of regional co-productions, I agree with Andre Breton when he says, “One publishes to find comrades.”
After Dennis Lim’s public talk on the “deaths of cinema,” an audience member raised the potential arrival of a new kind of cinema: the “vertical cinema” of TikTok and Instagram reels. Maybe it’s an easy remark to scoff at. But the recent exchanges between embittered political dynasties across social media have transmuted into national acts of sworn aggression and animosity. The war cries echoing across online spaces carry contemporary cinematic traits of auteurship and hybridity propelled by celebrity drama-esque betrayal and online leaks. We’re witnessing an increasingly vertical form of media as a result of institutional rage-baiting and have increasingly abandoned the will to discover any meaningful perspectives dispossessed of algorithms.
I have always been concerned about the state of critical writing in Cambodia. Yet the vertical space seems constitutive of our cinema of today, which feeds on the militant, revisionist, and hateful epics that have long subsisted on the self-regulating force of national fictions. Our cinema, caught between its present inertia and mythologized future, hasn’t died, but has laid comatose for decades and is all the more existential. The danger is doubled when collective anxieties accompany acts of blind indictment. The elites have engineered an artificial divergence to consolidate power rather than support infrastructures conducive for discourse.
At this intersection of revenge and skepticism, our situation is just a symptom of a global crisis, enduring a collapse in our ability to commune. I’m not one to advocate that film writing and cinema has the prescriptive power to remedy the political and transnational crisis. Instead, I think of it through the great Anand Patwardhan, who says, “Cinema is, after all, an intervention.”
To me, the cross-cultural gatherings at the Thai Film Archive and other spaces pose an interesting question of communicability. In the same keynote Lim iterates that “To write about cinema today is to write about its death.” I think we must also write about its failures. When it fails us, we begin to confront not its absence, but its frailty, its human dimensions, its possibilities. The point, perhaps, is to reframe cinema around what is possible to communicate with others, even as conversations among ourselves feel impossible.
At the end, I return to probe at the purpose of MARG1N and its direction in light of the border conflict. How do we define a regional cinema in a way that speaks past transnational crises? I do not have the one right answer. But a return to the cinema, where we watch and read the films of others and talk outside of echo chambers, should restore our awareness of our friends, collaborators, and the forces we’re truly up against.
I’m grateful for the encouragement of those around me. My thanks go to the Thai Film Archive, Kong Rithdee, Chalida Uabumrungjit, Dennis Lim, Lorna Tee, Daniel Mattes and many others. This essay was further strengthened by the thoughtful guidance from the editorial heads, Alyssandra Maxine and Sasha Han.