Transnational women's cinema in Southeast Asia: Mouly Surya's Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts

Scholars have argued that women’s cinema should be seen as transnational and that feminist film studies should resituate gender and cinema within a transnational perspective. In the context of Southeast Asia, transnational women’s cinema allows us to see how women filmmakers challenge dominant national discourses, reclaim cosmopolitan film aesthetics, negotiate with foreign arts and festival networks, and forge regional connections and solidarity in Southeast Asia and beyond. How does transnational women’s cinema resist universalizing tendency in feminism and engage with issues of power relations, friction, borders, and difference? This essay will discuss Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017) as a transnational feminist cinema in its feminist intervention of the Western genre, mobility in film festivals and networks, and embeddedness in the sphere of global activism, such as #MeToo. It also raises questions around the limits of transnationalism by analyzing the debates in Indonesia around cultural appropriation and the urban feminist gaze. This essay argues that while the transnational framework is important in looking at women’s cinema, categories of coloniality and colonial difference will help us complicate issues of power, knowledge, and borders in feminist cinema.