Positioned within debates on the future of film programming, the session reframes programming as an embodied, political practice that produces social relations and alternative publics, particularly in contexts shaped by censorship, precarity, and uneven access to film heritage. Through visual materials and practical tools, the session offers a transferable model for community-led, reparative programming that challenges canonical histories and institutional norms. It invites the audience to imagine film programming as a method of sustaining collective imagination in times of crisis.

Films

The session will include clips from Turang (1957, Bachtiar Siagian) and Garden Amidst the Flame (2022, Natasha Tontey), and will draw on Rizky’s essay for Asterisk Internationalist on queer cinema and political struggle, Queers Don’t Just Shoot Back—We Nurture the Fire.

About the speaker

Rizky Rahad (he/him) is an Indonesian filmmaker, programmer, and researcher whose work explores radical queer praxis as a means of escaping regimes of control and cultivating alternative ways of living. Based in Bali, he co-runs the cinema collective QAMERAD. His
latest film, H-O-R, follows survivors of anti-trans violence as they evade state surveillance and re-stage their own image, while his recent book, QUEERS SHOOT BACK!, imagines a liberatory queer cinema beyond the limits of neoliberal visibility politics. Rizky was selected for the 2026 Bertha Artivism Awards, the 2025 Flaherty Fellowship, the 2024 British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grant, and the 2021 Chevening Scholarship. His work has been screened at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, Queer East, and Fringe! Film and Arts Fest.

Dr. Tamara Soukotta is an Indonesian transdisciplinary (Development Studies) and decolonial scholar-practitioner currently affiliated with the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Tamara’s work is strongly influenced by her interests in decoloniality and other knowledges, as well as her background as a researcher and practitioner.

Coming from a practitioner background in Indonesia and now working in academia in the Netherlands, Tamara grounds theory in practice in both her research and teaching, and makes North-South as well as South-South connections, highlighting linkages between local and global. Beyond academia, Tamara also engages in collaborative research and popular education, making knowledge accessible to broader audiences through public lectures, workshops, and publications in both scholarly and popular outlets. In her work, Tamara collaborates with academics as well as policymakers, artists, activists, and other actors beyond academia, aiming at social transformations.