ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Afro-Asian Film Festival—born at the Asian Film Week in Beijing in 1957, and continued at Tashkent in 1958, Cairo in 1960, and Jakarta in 1964—as a “site of contest” for envisioning anticolonial cinema in the early Cold War. The festival matters as a cinematic thread in Bandung-era networks of organizations and conferences; as the earliest articulation of “cinematic Third Worldism,” a term usually used to describe militant anti-imperialist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s; and as a rise and fall of cinematic diplomacy unique to the Cold War era. While the Afro-Asian film circuit emerged from the state-initiated nonaligned movement, by the 1968 rebooted Tashkent Festival for Asian and African Cinema filmmakers it transformed from a ritualized sphere of high diplomacy to a transnational cinematic event addressing multiple publics, where militant cinema had a voice and a captive audience.
