Big River lab meeting

Kanchanaburi, Thailand

December 2025

The international artist run filmlabs movement is an ever expanding network of artist collectives dedicated to analogue cinema. As the name implies, these collectives are typically founded around the idea of a 'lab' – principally a fairly humble 'dark room' with facilities for developing, printing, editing and manipulating analogue cine film. These are places where the 'lomo tank' – the Soviet era film processing tank for hand developing movie film - reign supreme. The current iteration of these film labs had its origin in France in the 1990s, although throughout film history there have been individuals, collecctives and co-ops dedicated to hand made and experimental analgoue cinema. The impulse to explore using nothing but ones own resources is nothing new, but the current proliferation and blossoming into an interconnected worldwide network of experimental analogue practitioners is a feature of our age. In part it is the internet and the era of globalisation that has made this possible. And in part, the blossoming is a feature of both the necessity and opportunity of DIY work in the face of closing industrial facilities and the retreat of the commercial industry away from analogue practices. A benefit of this retreat has been the 'liberation' of once valuable commercial laboratory equipment into the hands of practising artists. This has been much appreciated 'fuel' for the artist run film labs.

Over the last couple of decades, there have been periodic meetings of the current iteration of artist run filmlabs – in Geneva in 1997, Grenoble in 2000, Brussels in 2005, Rotterdam in 2008, Zagreb in 2011, 'Bains Argentique' in Nantes in 2016, 'Encuentro' in Mexico City in 2018, and lastly 'Analogue Resilience' in Toronto in 2023. Apart from the last two of these meetings, they have all been in Europe. Typically, these meetings have not had major representations from the 'eastern hemisphere'. We have always had some presence and that presence should not be under characterised. However the European settings of these meetings has inevitably meant they have had a somewhat 'Euro-centric' feel. The Mexican lab meeting was a welcome change, though it did seem to have a fairly heavy US/Europe feel where it could have been refreshingly dominated by Latin America. In our hemisphere on the other had, we have one of the oldest surviving members of the current filmlabs network - Space Cell from Korea, which was founded in 2004. And we have several new and emerging labs, particularly in the past few years. DIY analogue cinema is getting ever stronger in Asia! It is time we got together and had our own lab meeting!

We are proposing to have a lab meeting of Asian and more generally 'eastern hemisphere' artist run film labs and analogue experimental practitioners in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, at the start of December, 2025. At this stage we anticipate somewhere between 25 and 50 participants. The core event of the meeting will be five days of discussions, demonstrations, workshops, screenings and performances. Labs or groups of individuals from different regions will be assigned a leading role in one of each of these activities each day. Five days. Five activities each day, with each activity organised by a different group, collective or grouping. We will see each others work, hear each others problems and solutions, learn from each other, and work with each other. The meeting would have many ambitions; to strengthen our local presence in our home countries; to create a greater understanding of the importance, relevance and viability of working with analogue in our region; to strengthen our understanding of the opportunities and challenges we face in our region; to increase our presence in the international stage more broadly. Ultimately, however, the main objective will be to learn how we can best support each other in making experimental analogue film work. It is about learning from and encouraging each other. The structure for the event should remain somewhat lose. The proposed framework of activities mentioned above is a starting point only. There are many directions any one of these streams could go. And they could also lead off into unanticipated directions. We aim to remain open to this! Nothing will be compulsory. Many things could happen concurrently. Anything could be abandoned!

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