The joy of reading, for most of my life, had been primarily grounded in the joy of learning, feeling, and thinking through words, independent of medium. That is, until college, when I found myself repeatedly longing for Thursday mornings, when the week’s freshly printed student newspaper would arrive neatly folded and stacked, ready to be unfolded and spread over the dining-hall table like wrapping paper. I came to realize then that the joy of reading was not simply about words; it was also about the tactile touch of paper and of the inexplicable satisfaction of flipping through pages bigger than my hands could reasonably manage.
When it comes to the pleasures of the tactile, material dimensions of reading, nothing, in my opinion, surpasses print magazines. Reading a print book offers the soft touch and the wafting scent of paper that digital versions cannot replicate, but even books with the most beautiful covers are inevitably too wordy (or most often, exclusively so) on the inside. Magazines, however, swirl ideas, illustrations, and images alongside the words, all brought together to life by the beat of color. As we become ever more subsumed by a digital world increasingly cannibalized by AI, print mediums like magazines can only become more precious.
Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.
For such reasons, I was elated to recently find out about the existence of MARG1N, a print-only Southeast Asian film magazine based in Cambodia — the discovery of novel magazines in the region is always a delight! For cinephiles in Vietnam and across Southeast Asia in particular, MARG1N will surely be a treasured find, for there exists nothing quite like it for devoted filmheads. Supported by the Cambodian film production company Anti-Archive, the project is envisioned to consist of five issues, with each issue focused on a pairing of two or three countries in the region under a particular theme. The upcoming third issue, titled “Cosmos,” is set to release later this year, exploring the titular theme across the regions of Brunei, Thailand, and Timor-Leste.
The core team behind the magazine consists of three members: filmmaker and editor-in-chief Savunthara Seng (Thara), based in Cambodia; Alyssandra Maxine (Max), based in the Philippines; and graphic designer Sonich Touch, who was previously based in Cambodia, but has recently relocated to Spain. As Max recounts in an interview with Minh Nguyen on Public Parking, the origins of the project trace back to when Max and Thara first connected on Letterboxd, where Max corresponded with Thara about how to pirate Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s eleven-hour film Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004).
Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.
Given this history, it was perhaps natural that the theme of the first issue, published in 2024, would be piracy, focused on Cambodia and the Philippines. Titled “pirate.lov3r.2024.mkv,” Issue 1 brings together a cacophony of voices and perspectives, from filmmakers, artists, critics, and mourners of DVD stores, presenting piracy as something more than simply “an open secret” — tabooed, given its unlawfulness and illegitimacy; yet open, given its ubiquity. “Name me one Filipino filmmaker whose film education did not involve piracy,” writes Khavn De La Cruz in the opening piece, who describes piracy as “a form of film preservation.” The theme of piracy highlights well MARG1N's general approach to engaging with film not simply as a form of art that exists in the abstract, but as one lives and breathes through dynamic social formations, like piracy markets and DVD stores for instance, for which Phnom Penh, as with the Philippines, is a “notorious haven,” as Thara writes in the introduction.
Issue 2, titled “Traces,” focuses on Vietnam and Singapore. The subjects covered in the second issue are diverse, but all possess qualities shared with that of the trace: spectral, fleeting, fragmentary. In “Regarding Latent Cinema,” Daryl Chong reflects upon unfinished films within the context of Singapore. In “Minor Observations of Trần Anh Hùng’s Trilogy,” Lanah Chu offers fragmentary, bullet-pointed reflections of Hùng’s widely celebrated films, perhaps more aptly described as poetry than prose. In “Cinemas Are Battlefields,” TN Đan goes through public archives in Singapore to present the history of cinema bombings in Vietnam from the 1940s through the 1970s. In “Microbecinema,” Grace Song writes of the parallels between microscopy and cinema as a means to reflect more broadly on microcinemas and independent film screenings. The issue also contains a visual script, a letter, and a comic strip.
Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.
Readers may find the specific combinations presented in each issue as surprising. But as the editors described in their interview with Saigoneer, the pairings are an intentional choice. Rather than pursuing what might be clichéd pairings — such as Thailand and Cambodia, for instance, given the geopolitical context — the MARG1N team tries to bring together countries without significant shared histories in order to “force” histories together in surprisingly productive ways. “When the countries are unified under a theme, we expose how similar we all are, despite very different forms of government and culture,” Thara remarked.
The idea of marginality behind the name of the magazine is core to the identity of the magazine. I sometimes find the notion of marginality to be somewhat tricky. If what is considered marginal cannot but be relational — namely, marginal to some other center or core — who is to say what constitutes such core or center? To what and to whom, to be concrete, is Southeast Asian film marginal? As the MARG1N team points out, certainly to the “West” — especially given the sheer difference in available resources for the film industry and culture across geographies — but also to the “Asian” canon. As Thara explains, “When the West refers to Asian cinema, it’s only a couple of countries talked about as if representative of the whole of Asia.”
Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.
But even within Southeast Asia and within specific countries, there exist internal dynamics of centers and peripheries, given Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines’ status as the “powerhouses” of the film industry within their region. But zooming in even further, Thara explained: “Even in the festival circuit, when the art house crowd refers to Thai cinema, for example, they think of only one name or representative… but it’s not just Apitchapong. The margin is spread throughout.”
Importantly, the magazine also conceptualizes marginality as a mode within film criticism as well. “When we imagine film criticism, we think of a kind of serious academia. We try not to do that because film criticism is also an amalgamation of other things, like poetry, visual essays, photography, collages,” Thara commented. “When combined together, they create dissonances and discourses that make a film magazine a film magazine. What is film criticism? It’s not just The New Yorker or MUBI. It can be more.” Remarkably, in reading the magazine, marginality does not feel as though it merely exists on the margins, but rather as permeating and dispersed across multiple layers, through and through, like dense rings of trees. Key to this quality is the magazine’s sustained attention to marginality in its various forms without, necessarily, the kind of self-marginalization often found in discourses on the subject.
Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.
During our chat, Max described MARG1N also as a project to produce “cinematic memorabilia.” As one might expect from this vision, MARG1N’s magazines are gorgeous and stunning, with a distinctive style that I would characterize as simultaneously eclectic and dreamy. The MARG1N team emphasized that the visuality and materiality of their magazines are a huge part of their identity and the reading experience they try to emulate, via unconventional formattings of texts, play with fonts, as well as the scattering of images, textured and granular. Indeed, some of my favorite pieces were those that were heavily visual, including Nguyên Lê’s “Season of Changes” in Issue 2, in which he writes about re-tracing scenes from Tony Bui’s Three Seasons (Ba mùa, 1999) in present-day Saigon. Accompanying his commentary are pairs of photographs for each location re-traced: a still shot from the film alongside a photograph of the same place in the present day, taken at a similar angle.
I read MARG1N’s issues in the form of digital review copies, and I can only imagine what it must be like to hold and read the magazines in print, a feeling I dearly miss living in a city where English-language print magazines are difficult to come by. The element of print “completely changes what is written,” Thara remarked, reflecting upon the place of print in the age of AI. As he astutely put it, “the digital almost becomes dated when you really touch the pages.”
Images courtesy of MARG1N.
The MARG1N team have told Saigoneer that a limited number of copies of Issues 1 & 2 will be available at Dogma Collection in Saigon, beginning mid-October. One can find more detailed information about the availability of copies in other parts of Southeast Asia on their website.
