Film curation as decolonial practice: the 69th Flaherty Seminar

This paper examines the 69th Flaherty Seminar as a critical experiment in decolonial film curation. Long critiqued for its Eurocentric origins and institutional elitism, the Flaherty's relocation to the Thai Film Archive in 2024—under the curatorship of May Adadol Ingawanij and Julian Ross—marked a deliberate attempt to disrupt entrenched hierarchies of cinematic knowledge. Through the programming of 28 films from Southeast Asia, Palestine, and other regions, the seminar mobilised animistic aesthetics, speculative historiographies, and relational epistemologies to challenge dominant frameworks of Western modernity and the Capitalocene. Key curatorial interventions – including the untranslated, sensorially immersive screening of the 1959 Thai 16mm film Tamone Prai – performed acts of epistemic disobedience by unsettling English-language spectatorship norms and centring marginalised cinematic traditions on their own terms. Yet the seminar also revealed structural contradictions: linguistic hierarchies limited Thai participants' full enunciation, and the inclusion of A Thousand Fires without Myanmar-based filmmakers complicated claims to transregional solidarity. Drawing on decolonial theory and situated reflection, the paper argues that the seminar's significance lies not in achieving a resolved decolonial model but in exposing the frictions between curatorial intention and institutional infrastructure. Decolonial curation emerges as an ongoing, relational, and necessarily unfinished project.