Film Screenings

Tuesday, 01 September 2026

Wednesday, 02 September 2026

Thursday, 03 September 2026

Mambang Kuneng: Listening to the Sea with Orang Laut (2026)

Directed by Di Fang
 |  | 30 min

Time & Location

Tuesday 15:00–16:30
Cinema Room

Synopsis

In recent years, extractive development has expanded into the coastal zones and seas of Insular Southeast Asia, which are the primary domain of sea nomads such as the Orang Laut. In the Riau Islands Province of Indonesia, Orang Laut communities face mounting pressure from modernization, squeezed from both land and sea. Industrial growth has reclaimed coasts, polluted waters, cleared mangroves, and disrupted sacred geographies. These conditions are not isolated but echo across Southeast Asia, where Indigenous maritime communities struggle with habitat loss, cultural erasure, and systemic marginalization within land-based governance frameworks.
The film is born from a collaborative research trip uniting an artist, social scientists, Orang Laut knowledge holders, and a local journalist. The journey was both interdisciplinary and intersubjective — weaving facts, myths, and emotions into shared experiences that cannot be captured by academic writing alone. Through daily encounters, shared meals, and a co-led listening and recording workshop with Orang Laut friends, the film documents embodied Indigenous knowledge and lived maritime cosmologies. It follows the Orang Laut to traditional grounds now clashing with the industrial expansion of mining factories, to households resisting encroachment while treasuring the sea as home, and to underwater sonic worlds near industrial zones, seeking to preserve acoustic experiences on the verge of disappearance.
Mambang Kuneng is known among the Orang Laut in Riau Islands as a sea spirit who teaches respect for the sea, the land, and other-than-human beings. This reverence permeates their everyday lives and exemplifies an alternative way of coexisting—countering the dominant, extractive, and binary understanding of the human–nature relationship underpinning today’s planetary crisis.
This film is more than a record of struggle; it foregrounds the community’s fragile yet profound knowledge systems—wisdom that guides them through unpredictable seas, coexistence with dangerous creatures, and migration across shifting waves. These are not archives of the past but living, adaptive epistemologies that offer alternative ways of sensing and coexisting with the sea. In the face of accelerating modernization and flows of capital, how can such knowledge and intangible heritage endure?
The film’s artistic approach also challenges conventional ethnographic representation by adopting a more-than-human perspective — told, imaginatively, through the eyes and movements of a crocodile, a spiritual figure in local cosmology.
The 20 to 30-minute film screening will be followed by a 60-minute moderated discussion on the topic Listening, Knowledge, and the Sea: Indigenous Epistemologies and Artistic Fieldwork.

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Culture, Country and Carbon: An exchange across the Timor Sea (2026)

Directed by Lisa Palmer (The University of Melbourne)
 |  | 18 min

Time & Location

Wednesday 12:00–13:30
Cinema Room

Synopsis

This film examines the experience of two Indigenous communities, from Timor-Leste and Australia, who are involved in carbon trading schemes. Foregrounding the Indigenous governance, labour and more-than-human care involved in the schemes’ planting of trees and management of fire, the film makes visible the capacities, skills and customary structures on which these locally produced environmental markets depend. It encourages viewers to question why some forms of governance and labour are made or remain invisible and unvalued, and suggests new ways of thinking about the work, care and responsibility underpinning such schemes.
While the exchange between these Timorese and Australian Indigenous community members is grounded in the shared experience of violent and oppressive colonial legacies, both groups are now focussed on the socio-cultural and environmental repair of their communities. Despite vastly different postcolonial circumstances, broadly shared Indigenous governance practices underpin their ongoing struggles over land, resources, food, language, and cultural recognition. In this context, carbon markets are valued as one way of enabling Indigenous wellbeing and potentially increasing the outside value and recognition given to Indigenous governance processes.

https://arkivukulturaekolojia.com/films-culture-country-carbon/

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Lisan and the Importance of Culture in Carbon Forestry in Timor-Leste (2024)

Directed by Lisa Palmer (The University of Melbourne)
 |  | 18 min

Time & Location

Wednesday 12:00–13:30
Cinema Room

Synopsis

In Timor-Leste’s Matebian mountain range, farmers participating in the Baguia region’s Ho Musan Ida carbon forestry program grow trees to sell carbon credits to the international market. The reforestation initiative is locally founded and controlled. It is built upon lisan, the deep social relationships people have with each other, their environment and their ancestors.

https://arkivukulturaekolojia.com/films-lisan/

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From Burma to Timor Leste (2025)

Directed by Jai Jai (Ngao Tong Films)
 |  | 30 min

Time & Location

Thursday 10:00–11:30
Cinema Room

Synopsis

In 2006 two Burmese migrant workers on the Thai-Burma border thought they had found good paid work when they were offered an opportunity on a Thai fishing boat. Little did they realize they had become part of human trafficking. Enduring incredibly harsh conditions, unable to leave the boat or return home they finally escaped by swimming to Timor-Leste. In this documentary they tell their amazing story of exploitation and hardship and how they finally found sanctuary.

https://www.youtube.com/@NgaoTongFilms

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