SILKE SCHMICKL: The Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival is the very first festival at M+! It celebrates alternative moving image practices that have thrived on the fringes of the mainstream over the past six decades and offers new perspectives on the region’s vibrant art and film histories.

ULANDA BLAIR: The festival celebrates moving image that is experimental, risky, critically engaged, and relevant to our time and place. It includes pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s experimenting with early film and video formats, as well as the current generation of artists using the latest digital technologies.

CHANEL KONG: Avant-garde film is not, and has never been, one thing—its identity has always been pluralistic. Anchored in the formal and conceptual diversity of the M+ Moving Image Collection, the Festival reflects the cultural landscape of Asia, both past and present.

LI CHEUK-TO: For our first festival, we want to inspire audience curiosity. This is an ongoing project and so M+ audiences should expect the unexpected for years to come! Filmmakers and artists have always played a crucial role in re-examining the past and creating new historical narratives.

SILKE SCHMICKL: Many artists have created powerful images otherwise absent from mainstream media and then others have recycled existing images and materials to comment critically on the present.

LI CHEUK-TO: This festival explores the different ways that artists have utilised the moving image as a means for artistic expression and political agitation, pushing otherwise unseen, and unspoken, perspectives into the cultural sphere.

ULANDA BLAIR: The Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival highlights the flexibility of the moving image.

CHANEL KONG: We offer different spatial and social experiences through screenings, performances, installations, exhibitions, workshops, tours, and talks, and more.

ULANDA BLAIR: It also encourages focused and multi-sensory viewing rather than the 5-second engagement we often have with social media and the internet that’s essentially controlled by algorithms.

SILKE SCHMICKL: The festival emphasises the importance of inter-generational dialogues, friendships, networks, and self-sustained grassroots initiatives in sustaining avant-garde film practices.

LI CHEUK-TO: Through M+’s unique lens of visual culture, it considers the connections between film, video, and other time-based forms such as performance, theatre, sound art, dance, music, and oral storytelling.

ULANDA BLAIR: The festival brings people together while pushing existing understandings of what the moving image is, and what it can be.