Minikino is a Denpasar, Bali-based organisation dedicated to the dissemination of short films. Active since 2002, it operates across exhibition, education, and community engagement, collaborating with art house cinemas and public spaces transformed into screening venues. Through both local and transnational exchanges, Minikino links communities, practitioners, and audiences within a wider short film network.

We spoke to Fransiska Prihadi, Minikino’s programme director, about its interregional connection, the challenges of its operations, as well as its work in fostering critical thinking and accessibility.

Can you tell us a bit about Minikino’s history? How was it founded?

Minikino is quite old: it started in 2002. It was founded by three women, all architecture graduates. Tintin Wulia – she’s still doing audiovisual works and is now based in Sweden. Kiki Zakiah is still working with film, mostly documentaries. She’s with In-Docs now. Judith Guritno is an artist, working on murals.

I joined Minikino in 2010 as a volunteer. It started with monthly screenings and discussions. Even at the very beginning, they invited artists, and not film professionals. Tintin is a planner by heart. She and Kiki made a very good blueprint of what they imagined Minikino could be and should be. Even in 2015–2016 we were still regularly revisiting that blueprint. Some things have evolved a lot, of course, but you can still see the traces, the skeleton of the thinking.

They started really small, and now we actually go back to being small in terms of the number of people working day to day. As long as we’re still needed, and there are still people willing to go the extra mile, we will survive. Why people still need us, has to do with critical thinking.

If we rewind a bit: did you have a physical space dedicated to Minikino from the beginning, or did that come afterwards? 

The very first Minikino meeting was in Denpasar, Bali. The host space was Tintin’s parents’ music school. The space is really good, with about 100 foldable seats. The space is called Irama Indah, and it supported Minikino up until 2024. At the beginning of 2024, the owner – still family members – had other thoughts. It continues to function as a music hall, but no longer for film screenings. 

In 2019, Edo and I created an arthouse cinema, which became our home base, where we can show films on our own terms and be flexible.

How did you find space for your arthouse cinema? Did you renovate it? 

From where I’m speaking now, it used to be just our house. The building had already been converted from a shop-house module. In 2018 we found out the shop-house next door was for rent. We rented it, converted it, and invested quite a lot to make it an arthouse cinema café. We moved the whole office there and created an artist residency there. 

2024 was really, really tough for us. It all happened at once. Government funding stopped, and at the same time, the building owner decided not to renew the lease agreement. We decided it was safer to renovate our own house. Now I’m literally living above the cinema. The good news is that the cinema is wider. There used to be only 34 seats, about five metres wide, but now, because the space is wider, about 6.5 metres wide, we can have 57 seats. For Edo and me, it’s now a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor. The third floor is office and meeting rooms, plus a mezzanine for storage and another library. The fourth floor is the artist residency. All in all, we managed to survive. 

Did you have any support for the renovation?

When Tintin, Kiki, and Judith started in 2002, they designed a “master plan” without any legal form or business model in mind. It was pure idealism, almost utopia. In 2015, we started organising the Minikino Film Week as an annual festival, which has been and remains international. Before, people simply donated because they trusted us as the founders of the festival. When it is annual, people pay more attention. People who offered support began to ask, “Is this commercial or not?” or “Is this a liability?” because they were donating to something without a legal form. So, we thought it was time to create one. In 2017 we formed a non-profit foundation.

Less than one year after we did the tax report, we realised that a non-profit has no perks whatsoever from the government; they treat us like a for-profit company. Why not also create a for-profit organisation, so we can separate things that can be commercialised and things that can receive public funding? The for-profit became what we call the “milking cow”. At the same time, we could secure production funding for the festival. Government funding is always yearly. We have to knock on doors, and there is never a sustainable model.

Our for-profit company’s main service was subtitling and post-production. It’s fundamentally interpretation work, and that is what our volunteers were good at. We have been doing subtitling since 2010, and it was good until last year, when AI became really good. In 2023 we already thought, oh my goodness, this is going to be dangerous, but it happened too fast. In April we lost a big project that had run for seven years. After that, the finances were really bad. We relied on mostly personal savings.

Are you trying to find another way of financing now? 

We are still playing around with what model can work. Our strong point is education. We have developed modules for five-year-olds up to 17-year-old students: filmmaking workshops, animation, stop-motion, and film literacy and also critical thinking. 

But education sits on a thin line. Do you go private and cater to people who might not need it, because they already have a good education? Or do you knock on doors for people who really need it? As we are based in Bali, we don’t have many options. For the past four years, we had good government support, so we could go into schools because it was paid. But these modules are frozen at the moment.

We are thinking of ways to pivot our for-profit activity while looking at grants, writing proposals, and rebuilding. Since last year, after moving to this new place, we stopped regular screenings after doing it for six years. I’m very much looking forward to hearing what Sinema Transtopia and others think, and how they survive. With a regular schedule, people took it for granted, so the number of people coming was not reliable enough as an income source. We switched the arthouse cinema model to event-based. For the festival, it’s by donation. For the arthouse cinema, it’s either rental, or we run ticketed events. 

Who are your audiences? What is the composition of your audiences? 

A lot of people are not from Bali. They live in Bali, but come from other parts of Indonesia, or are expats. The biggest chunk of the audience are what we call pendatang: Indonesians, but not Balinese. People from Jogja, Jakarta, or other islands, who come as students or to work, across all ages. 

The arthouse cinema and the festival are different demographics. Minikino Film Week, for example, is eight days. Screenings happen in the arthouse cinema and also in public places converted into cinemas for those eight days. Each festival can work with almost 15 different venues. For the past three years we introduced the term “community screenings.” By “community screenings,” we mean supporting communities that screen films all year round to build community – some focus on the environment, some on women, with films as discussion triggers. Community screenings don’t necessarily offer the best technical quality, but they allow films to meet audiences who will appreciate them. That’s how Minikino Film Week works, also as a pop-up cinema. During Minikino Film Week we try to balance local Balinese audiences with people who come from outside, including international visitors. 

Is your programming strategy for the arthouse cinema correspondingly community-orientated? 

Yes, but we really need to invest more time and energy in developing that programming. The most difficult aspect is that over the past six years, we have primarily worked with short films within conventional arthouse frameworks. We collaborate with filmmakers who share a similar vision, but the economic side of things, negotiations and distribution agreements, has never been the main priority. What distributor or filmmaker would agree to lend a film for two years, receive reports every three months, and share in ticket sales priced at just two euros? Even with a 50% split, the returns are negligible – sometimes less than sixty euros over two years. There is simply no viable economy in that model, and artists cannot sustain themselves this way.

We have come to recognise the limitations of our approach. The only way it can work is through collaboration with other arthouse cinemas across Indonesia. We thought about it, especially during a period when the Indonesian government released funding for micro-cinemas with very good terms, but they only provided the projector and some sound. Communities had to find their own resources to train themselves in how to run screenings or arthouse cinemas. Some communities already connected to Minikino came to us: “Can we do an internship with your programmer?” We were happy to work with these micro-cinemas, of course, but government support was not smooth. Even the final payment installments for buying equipment got stuck. 

The network you built is super interesting. I also read you have inter-regional connections: S-Express, for example. And you also worked with the Yamagata Documentary Dojo. How did you expand your network, and does it help you in real terms?

When Tintin, Kiki, and Judith came up with the blueprint in 2002, they knew we couldn’t survive without a strong network. Even when the co-founders are not here anymore, we have this ethic of maintaining good relationships with the people we work with.

We live in an ecosystem where word of mouth really counts. You never know how one thing will lead to the next. For example, someone was an intern five years ago, and now they work somewhere else and can connect us to something new. It’s amazing, this web of networking. 

Regarding critical thinking that you mentioned earlier, I saw you have a website with articles, film criticism of short films. 

Yes, we created a specific page seven years ago. It came from Yamagata, an artist-in-residency Dojo programme. We collaborated with the Asako Documentary Dream Centre on their third Dojo. Indonesian filmmakers came to Bali for our residency, and Thai filmmakers based in Bangkok went to Chiang Mai. They had three weeks of new space and fresh thinking to think about their projects. I love that system: how it nurtures, how it doesn’t push you to produce immediate output. In Dojo, you’re not expected to finish work in a strict timeframe. 

We realised we don’t have enough writers. Seeing how Documentary Dojo had such an inspiring method, we translated it into a new programme: a hybrid internship for film festival writers. At first it aimed at 19-25 year-olds, but after three years we shifted to 21-30. The internship lasts five months: four months they stay where they are, watch films, write, and meet online with speakers from international and national contexts, and then for two weeks of the festival they come. They experience the festival, and the next year these interns become our youth jury and conduct Q&As during the festival. We also accept contributions from the general audience. It becomes an ecosystem.

Your accessibility work is very special. Could you tell us more about that? 

We use a label so people can recognise it: we call it “inclusive cinema.” Our programme currently focuses on people with low vision and blindness, and people who are hard of hearing or Deaf. Honestly, the more active stakeholders are the low-vision community. For Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, people think closed captions are enough. But it doesn’t work in Indonesia because the education system for Deaf communities is unequal; they have limitations in vocabulary. Subtitles and captions help, of course, but enjoying films can still be a struggle. So for Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, we include sign language – one-third of the screen. That is difficult too: in Indonesia, the sign language system used in schools was not created by Deaf people, so the community doesn’t use it. In Bali, Jogja, and Jakarta, sign language differs slightly. If we want to make it accessible, it becomes: different sign language for different districts. We do it anyway. Our strategy is to lean towards films with less dialogue, to reach younger audiences, and to select films that can work with sign interpretation and discussion.

We started audio descriptions when people with strong interest in cinema came in 2018 and asked if they could attend screenings with “whisperers.” In Indonesia there used to be a good social-activism practice called bioskop bisik, whispering cinema. Basically, you create a group who makes friends with and accompanies visually impaired people to the cinema, and whispers the film to them. But we found it disruptive. In 2018 we had around 40 blind audience members and maybe eight volunteer whisperers. The whisperer from the south might have a different interpretation from the one from the east. One might be funny, another sensual. We feel that it can never be truly inclusive because it disturbs people who don’t need whispering, and it creates a separate experience that can’t be shared. Audio description is actually a good bridge. The first time, we wrote it ourselves, produced it, and invited the blind community to comment: what is appropriate, what is disturbing. Blind people have excellent hearing and imagination. Not everything should be described. It should allow space for imagination and for dreams. After two years, we thought: why not make them with voice talent? Some work as helpline operators or radio broadcasters: they have great voices, sharp, funny, and we became good friends.

How do you understand Cinema of Commoning?

For idealist activism, there still need to be three aspects, three models. One should be non-profit, solely for public benefit. One has to be for-profit, so you can have sustainable income for the people working with you. And one is the community. These three models need to be sustainable to keep it alive. For us the for-profit part is struggling, and we know relying on public funding is also not reliable at this time.

Fransiska Prihadi is the programme director of Minikino, a Bali-based short film organisation, and co-founder of the arthouse cinema MASH Denpasar. With a background in architecture, she works across short film programming and industry initiatives, connecting films with audiences and broader social contexts. She has been involved with national and international festivals as a programmer, preselection committee member, and juror, and is actively engaged in shaping platforms that support the circulation of short films across different regions and international contexts.