Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Southeast Asia

"Even if a film does not display a map as such, by nature, it bears an implicit relation with cartography."

—Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (2007)

No literal maps are highlighted in the nine films from Timor Leste, Jakarta, Sabah, Mindanao, Pattani, Chiang Mai, and Rakhine that constitute the program. However, a range of places are traversed and identities navigated in figurative cartographic explorations: mountain hideouts, rolling hills, seaside villages, town centers, rural peripheries, periurban communities, humble abodes, and their denizens and residents—natives, migrants, transients, fugitives, unsettled and displaced, trying to make a home, dreaming of the freedom of mobility. The images are rich with topographical elements, and the narratives offer topographical devices, to guide spectators in understanding what defines locations, be they neighborhoods connected by dirt roads and shorelines, paths snaking through informal settlements, unmarked expanses, and landscapes divided by wired fences.

Rural sociologist Nancy Peluso put forward the notion…