ABSTRACT
In 1965 Indonesia, the CIA helped Suharto spread false reports on a coup plot by the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), contributing to an anti-communist purge; that same year, a farmer chances upon a film shoot by a foreign crew of a fake moon landing and has his tongue cut off. The latter is a speculative invention of Yosep Anggi Noen’s fiction film, The Science of Fictions (2019). In Daniel Hui’s hybrid speculative fiction / documentary Snakeskin (2014), set in the year 2066 in Singapore, references to the 1950s Chinese leftist movements form part of the film’s excavation of national myths and half-forgotten memories. Noen’s imagined past and Hui’s speculative future meet in Cold War secrecies that periodically haunt the cinema of the region.
