This article appeared in the February 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Open Door (Henry Barakat, 1963)

Indonesian curator and artist Bunga Siagian had never seen Turang (1958), the acclaimed film by her father, Bachtiar Siagian, while growing up. She had never seen any of his films, in fact—she had only read about them in books. Bachtiar was a major Communist revolutionary filmmaker in the 1950s and ’60s, but after the attempted military coup in 1965 and the purge that followed, which led to the U.S.–backed dictatorship of Suharto, he was imprisoned and seemingly all his films were destroyed. In the last decade, however, Bunga’s search for her father’s work started bearing fruit. In 2013, a print of his film Violetta (1962) turned up at the Sinematek Indonesia in Jakarta, having been donated by a “mobile screening” manager. And in 2023, Turang was found at the Russian Federation Archive in Moscow—a copy had survived there after the film had screened at the Afro-Asian Film Festival in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958.

A couple of weeks ago, Bunga presented Turang to a packed audience at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR). It was the crown jewel of a retrospective dedicated to films screened at the three Afro-Asian Film Festivals of the late ’50s and early ’60s: editions in Cairo in 1960 and Jakarta in 1964 followed the inaugural Tashkent event. These festivals embodied the spirit of the historic Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, where 29 Asian and African nations, many of them newly independent or in the process of decolonizing, met to seed an anti-imperialist alliance dedicated to self-determination, sovereignty, and peace. With the globe split during the Cold War between the First World of the U.S. and the West, and the Second World of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, these nations—which together comprised more than half the earth’s population at the time—declared themselves the “Third World,” charting an independent path that, six years later at the Belgrade Conference of 1961, would be formalized as the “Non-Aligned Movement.”

The IFFR retrospective, curated by Stefan Borsos with Bunga’s input from her research on the Afro-Asian Film Festivals, anticipates the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference this April, and included 13 titles from Indonesia, China, India, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Lebanon, Ghana, and the USSR. Titled Through Cinema We Shall Rise!, the series captured the promise of a brief but historic moment in time—when a cultural network outside of colonial and capitalist systems seemed possible, and cinema was singed by the flames of revolution and nation-building—as well as its contradictions. The films were submitted to the festivals by governments rather than individual filmmakers, and the mandates of nationalist myth-making, entertaining spectacle, and artistic achievement all collided in them.

Some of the films in the IFFR series were unabashed, if impressively mounted, works of propaganda. Serfs (Li Jun, 1965) a gorgeous peasant melodrama told with hushed, expressionistic flair, frames Mao and the People’s Liberation Army as the messianic saviors of the Tibetan people from the clutches of feudalism. Freedom for Ghana (Sean Graham, 1957), a newsreel made by a British officer of the Colonial Film Unit with a mixed Ghanaian and British crew, is an infuriatingly patronizing account of Ghana’s independence: at one point, a male, Indian-accented voice interrupts the stately English voiceover to declare that Indians no longer dislike the British, thanks to the latter’s gracious handover of power. (The film was one of two Ghanaian submissions at the Tashkent festival, and the only film from sub-Saharan Africa in the IFFR program, reflecting the lack of filmmaking infrastructure in those nations at the time.)

And then the retrospective had films like Turang—works that embody a true people’s cinema, fueled by both passionate ideological convictions and a neorealist commitment to life on the ground. Bachtiar Siagian’s movie is cited in reports from Tashkent as one of the most lauded films at that edition, though the director himself was not permitted to attend the festival and is not mentioned in any coverage. Siagian was a persona non grata to the Indonesian government at the time: a previous film had been censored for supporting the struggle of farmers against a state-backed urban development project. Turang, too, is no simple tale of heroism. Set during the Indonesian liberation struggle against the Dutch colonial army, the film follows a freedom fighter who is injured during an operation and has to hide in a small village until he heals. He is stowed in an attic by a sympathetic family and cared for by the daughter, who, in the course of his stay, falls in love with him.

The film thrums with suspense, making dynamic visual use of the cramped interiors of huts and the treacherous forests where soldiers prowl, but it is unusually uneventful for the most part, centering on a soldier in repose. When the man kicks back into action toward the end of the film, terrible tragedy ensues—instigated by a traitor—and a postscript tells us that the film pays tribute to the victims of a 1947 massacre: 431 residents of the village then called Rawagede—almost all the males above the age of 15—were murdered by the Dutch army because they refused to disclose the location of a freedom fighter. (Watching this film in Rotterdam reminded me of encountering the Banjarmasin Diamond in the nearby Rijksmuseum; “This diamond is war booty,” began the exhibit’s caption.) Siagian affirms the great sacrifices made by ordinary villagers, peasants, and their families in the struggle—sacrifices that are rarely memorialized or honored in official accounts of revolutionary movements, as fights waged by the people are swiftly co-opted by elites jockeying for power.

Like Turang, many films in the series deftly folded romances into political dramas, drawing on the sense of passion that drives both love and revolution: an irrepressible desire for a utopian ideal that burns bright enough to justify enormous sacrifices. In A Phu and His Wife (Mai Lộc, 1960), a Vietnamese selection, a woman kidnapped and held as a slave-wife by a local landlord (who is also in cahoots with the French) aids in the escape of A Phu, a strident peasant imprisoned and whipped for his refusal to submit to the feudal lords. Aroused—in more ways than one—by the handsome, principled man suddenly brought into her midst, heroine My contends with the prospect, and costs, of exercising her own agency. “Am I going to end my life here? Stand up… or get sat on?” she wonders, while the grain mill grinds in the background, alternating streaks of light and shadow on her and A Phu’s faces, and steam from the stove fills the hut. Her decision thrusts the film into gorgeous action on the hillside: the churning rivers, the steep cliffs, and the dense woods through which A Phu and My chart their escape teem with danger, but they’re also beautiful landscapes full of freedom and possibility.

Love stories are also a means to center women in male-dominated narratives of guerilla fighting and speak to their two-pronged struggle for liberation—from the violence of both colonizers and the men in their intimate lives. The Egyptian title The Open Door (1963), which won a prize at the 1964 Jakarta edition of the Afro-Asian Film Festival, is a startlingly modern tale of a young woman’s political awakening against the backdrop of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. Directed by Henry Barakat and adapted from a novel by Latifa al-Zayyat, the film follows Laila, a college student in Cairo, who is a fiery feminist at the start: she attends protests, idealizes revolutionary struggle, and balks at arranged marriage—much to the chagrin of her wealthy, conservative parents. Then a brush with sexual violence wounds her deeply; she no longer knows whether to trust her hopes and ideals. Meanwhile, revolutionary fervor roils in Egypt, as Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers set out to topple the Egyptian monarchy.

The meat of The Open Door are Laila and her friends’ conversations—laced with a screwball zing—about love, marriage, and men, as they try to reconcile the rhetoric of liberation that suffuses the air around them with the freedoms available to them within their homes. (“Books tell us we’re free but if we believe it we’re sinners!”) Hussain, a radical who covets Laila, writes in letters from the front lines that his love for his homeland and his love for her are entwined: he desires independence for them both. In the film’s final scene—one that belongs to the canon of great train scenes in cinema—Laila finally makes a decision. She abandons her family and the stuffy old professor she has reluctantly agreed to marry at the train station, as they prepare to leave a turmoil-ridden Cairo for the countryside, and walks over to Hussain, who’s departing on another train. When her father tries to stop her, she says coolly, “Get out of my way, dad.” A revolutionary slogan, if I ever heard one!

Someone Else’s Children (1958), the best movie I saw at this year’s IFFR, also ends with a woman making a decision at a train station. Directed by acclaimed Soviet-era Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze and restored a couple of years ago by the Georgian National Film Center, the film is a remarkable work of social realism. In high-contrast black and white, it tells the story of Nato, a young college student in Tbilisi, who is drawn into the lives of two children, Gia and Lia, and their widower father. Nato meets Gia and Lia one afternoon when the kids get into trouble with motorists while playing on the street; she pretends to be their mother and rescues them from a beating, which instantly endears her to the kids. Gia and Lia become enamored with this warm and kind mother figure, and soon, so does their father. Yet this tale of childlike optimism butts up against surprisingly grown-up realities, with a twist that forces Nato—rather than Gia and Lia—to come of age in a virtuoso closing sequence at the railway depot.

Someone Else’s Children was not part of the Through Cinema We Shall Rise! retrospective, but there’s a moment in it that gestures to the era of Non-Aligned Movements and Afro-Asian solidarity. At one point, Gia’s friends try to tempt him to sneak out and go to a movie with them, and one of them hums a song from the film to entice him. I recognized the song: “Mera joota hai Japani” from Shree 420, a Hindi movie from 1955 starring Raj Kapoor, the greatest Indian producer/director/star of the era. Kapoor’s films were hugely popular in China, Africa, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. In those years, popular Hindi cinema absorbed and reflected the dreams of a brand-new, socialist-secular nation, with visions of small-time crooks and vagabonds taking on wealthy, landowning villains. They traveled well in socialist countries as part of cultural diplomacy efforts, and were embraced enthusiastically as escapist alternatives to Western entertainment.

Traces of that history still pop up in cinema: Jia Zhangke’s 2000 debut feature Platform (more trains!) shows the characters watching Kapoor’s Awaara (1951) in the cinema, and more recently, I spotted a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to the famous song from Shree 420 in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). (It also shows up in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Gravity, among other films.) These allusions point to an alternative cinematic unconscious—what Masha Salazkina, author of the book World Socialist Cinema, calls “a different geography of knowledge, one that resists the Anglo-Atlantic Eurocentric canon of film history.” They invoke a time when internationalism wasn’t just synonymous with the Westernization of the world, but implied a tradition of solidarity across borders. That history has more or less been snuffed out in the years since the Cold War, but it still persists—in memories, in archives, and in the movies. To see it brought back to life at IFFR was nothing short of thrilling.