What is Re:Frame
Re:Frame is a new curatorial platform initiated by CiLENS , extending four years of work through Indie Chinese Cinema Week into a wider field: East and Southeast Asian moving image and its diasporas. Its inaugural edition, “Nearby and Opaque,” was presented across five venues in Berlin, 10–19 September 2026.
Open Call and Selection
For its first open call, Re:Frame received over 400 submissions. Seven invited jury members — Herb TAM 谭海俊, Darunee Terdtoontaveedej, Roger Garcia, Pony Ma, QIAN Ying, Malve Lippmann, and Yun Huang — joined Re:Frame's curatorial team in a rigorous selection process. 39 works were selected across seven curated programmes.
Key Visual Design: Minu Kim
Poster Design: Mandy Gou
1st Edition:
Nearby and Opaque
What does it mean to be near without being transparent to one another?
Re:Frame's inaugural edition begins from this question. Rather than presenting East and Southeast Asia and their diasporas as a coherent geography, “Nearby and Opaque” enters the spaces between the frictions, dislocations, and unfinished relations that persist within and across these contexts.
To speak nearby, rather than speak about, is to resist the authority of full explanation. To embrace opacity is to recognise that genuine encounter does not require complete understanding. These are not failures, they are the actual textures of living across differences.
Moving image, in this context, is not simply cinema. It is a spatial and social condition of encounter: a space where different histories, contexts, and subjectivities come into contact while remaining irreducible to one another. Works are selected for their capacity to hold this proximity without resolution.
Photo Credit: Shin Chen, Iris Wang, Monica Jiang
Recap
Re:Frame's inaugural edition ran across five dates and five venues in Berlin, no two nights taking the same shape.
Opening night at Giri Berlin, 10 September, drew a full house. A listening session by Temple Rat and a closing DJ set framed “Flesh, Ecstasy,” SHEN Shuowen's programme; the director and producer of one selected work, The House of The Father, joined the audience afterward for a conversation.
At Sinema Transtopia, 12 September, two programmes screened back to back at the arthouse cinema: “Re:Framing the Topography,” curated by Julia FALERO, and “Six Encounters — Jury's Pick,” curated by Echo Xuedan TANG.
13 September brought an intimate, small-scale screening aboard a houseboat at SaltyAcid: “Things Brought Ashore,” introduced online by curator Jane Zhenyi WEI, followed by conversation with the audience.
“Things Brought Ashore” returned on 18 September at Kino & Bar in der Königstadt, another of Berlin's independent arthouse cinemas, this time paired with a Chinese tea tasting and a post-screening conversation with special guest speaker Popo Fan.
Studio dB carried the closing night, 19 September, from four in the afternoon into the night: three programmes — “To Mean It” (DENG Qiwen), “Re:Framing the History of the Absence” (Stella Kluge), and “The Borrowed Compasses” (Jane Zhenyi WEI) — alongside two live audiovisual sets, a performance, two DJ sets to another full house.
Every screening across the ten days carried its own conversation afterward — with visiting filmmakers, with the curatorial team, with the audience. In total, the creative teams behind five selected works — “The House of the Father,” “A Wonderful Thing to Do,” “2024: A Swiss Odyssey,” “Mianhua Islet,” and “Oriental Pearls”, joined in person, meeting not only the audience but each other: fellow filmmakers exchanging work and context across a single edition. The feedback, from venues, audiences, and filmmakers alike, was some of the best we could have hoped for.
Across the festival, the curation stayed interdisciplinary — moving image in dialogue with sound, performance, and live audiovisual work, never isolated inside a single screening format.
Jury
For Re:Frame's first edition, selection was carried out with seven invited founding jury members — external readers from across disciplines, regions, and ways of seeing, who joined Re:Frame's curatorial team throughout this year's open call review:
Herb TAM 谭海俊, Darunee Terdtoontaveedej, Roger Garcia, Pony Ma, QIAN Ying, Malve Lippmann, Yun Huang
detailed introductions of each jury member on Instagram
On Making Re:Frame
Re:Frame grows out of four years of making: curating Sinophone cinema in Berlin through CiLENS, in particular Indie Chinese Cinema Week, watching what happened when these films met the people who came to see them, and slowly recognising that the questions they raised had never belonged to Sinophone cinema alone.
The frame widened, through accumulation: films seen, conversations had, contexts encountered. Moving image, we came to understand, is not simply a medium or genre. It is a condition of relation — always in dialogue with other forms, other histories, and other ways of knowing.
Re:Frame is our attempt to hold that wider field, with the same attention we have tried to bring from the beginning. It will keep changing in form; what we care about will not.
I hope this first edition offers a space to see, think, encounter, and perhaps stay with something longer.
— Echo Xuedan TANG, Founder & Artistic Director
Credits
Presented in the context of Re:Frame — a Berlin-based curatorial platform for East and Southeast Asian moving image and its diasporas, initiated by CiLENS e.V.
Team
Echo Xuedan TANG — Founder & Artistic Director
Julia Falero — Programme Coordinator & Curator
Jane Zhenyi WEI — Co-Curator & Curation Coordinator
SHEN Shuowen — Programme Curator
Stella Kluge — Programme Curator
DENG Qiwen — Programme Curator
WANG Tuo — Social Media Communication
Nina Pataridze — Publication Chief Editor
Mandy Gou — Publication Design and Art Direction
Kelly Entong Wu — Publication Design
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