TOWARDS KINO-SHIP, Or how we make social cinephilia: A MANIFESTO

1. Watch less films, and talk to more people.
2. Watching shitty films in groups makes it better.
3. Praising is real when criticized.
4. Social cinephilia is a practice of critique and a struggle for survival.
5. Subtitling is not neutral. It is a political position. It is the core multi-layered experience of cinematic literacy.
6. Social cinephilia is an engine of experimentation with film form.
7. Cinema is knowledge production.
8. Social cinephilia smells out infrastructures of engagement at different levels.
9. Film form and aesthetics are the engine of mediation, where social relations collide, circulate, and multiply within the domino force of social cinephilia.
10. Social cinephilia aims mainly to disturb the hegemony of centralized film distributions and, therefore, it seeks image productions where audiences are anonymous producers and authors.
11. Social cinephilia is a workshop of speculating self-reflective futures through remembering and listening carefully to the negated histories and voices of the grand project of the Bandung conference whose authoritarianism brought us up to forget about them.
12. Social cinephilia is the viral micro-organism that forms a disease that paralyzes the whole body of censorship.
13. Social cinephilia is an agent of memory-making that potentializes the event of watching films on a micro level as a method to hold spaces for the dispossessed.
14. Social cinephilia unfolds as a metamorphic feast: screenings bleed into seminars; seminars into protests; protests into picnics and dance. Traditional cinephilia, by contrast, celebrates zombie loneliness, feeding on fetishistic rivalry and delusions of cinema.
15. Social cinephilia aims to counter extractive systems of exploitation of filmmakers as precarious cultural workers. It encourages a fair-sharing culture to support the lives of films and filmmakers, acknowledging that money is not the only form of support.
16. Social cinephilia must operate as a social ecology for images circulating through cloud stacks and platform cinema, where the abstract global is composed of social localities, and every local context is shaped—yet not exhausted—by the hegemony of the global economy.
17. The screening space in social cinephilia is where the audiences cut off filmmakers, to wake them up to the traffic lights of social context.
18. Social cinephilia emerges as a utopian space against a permanent crisis, a space shaped by hopes once dismissed, deferred, and declared out of time. It is where we labor to construct “WEs,” where pleasure becomes shared practice, where we nongkrong while learning to read images haunted by exhausted futures, and where we search together for exits.
19. We know that social cinephilia will inevitably be commodified, neutralized, and absorbed by global hegemonic regimes of art and knowledge production. Yet it persists as a ghostly social experience—stubborn, unresolved, and resistant—so long as it remains collectively self-reflective, refusing closure and ownership.