Bromocorah and the "unfinished scene": Ten Years Thailand (2018)

When I learnt about the theme of bromocorah for the Arkipel symposium, I found the idea very evocative for thinking about the ways in which film form itself whether through experimentation, genre or aesthetics can be considered in relation to the “unfinished scene”. As the organizers of the symposium note, the concept of bromocorah suggests a potentiality for “coming into being” or indeed of “being otherwise.” There is an unruliness and a playfulness to the term that is helpful to consider with regards to films that similarly play with form and genre to imagine alternative futures. Films that are made in cultures of censorship are often, out of necessity, required to take on the form of “clandestine activists”. What might or might not get past the censors (whose judgement is often arbitrary in the first place)?
As filmmakers negotiate these arbitrary restrictions, they, like the bromocorah, may demonstrate what the organizers describe as a “skepticism towards the established knowledge regime”. Becoming a tactician, they explain, requires a certain degree of flexibility and “speculative thinking”. And it is this aspect of speculative thinking that I want to consider in relation to the recent Ten Years International project, focusing in particular on the collection of dystopian fictions in the Ten Years Thailand anthology, which (while I acknowledge the elephant in the room – are there no women filmmakers in this imagined future?) similarly experiments with form and storytelling in order to imagine “ways of being otherwise”.