Documentaries at JIFFest provide glimpses of Indonesia
By Tam Notosusanto
JAKARTA (JP): It's called The Great Post Road. It's a 1,000 kilometer passage that cuts across the island of Java, from Anyer to Panarukan. The road was built in early 19th century under the instruction of Herman Willem Daendels, the governor general of the Dutch East Indies, to allow smooth transportation of goods during the colonial era. Connecting a number of Java's cities, the road exists today as a reliable means of transportation and communication.
Certainly it takes more than that to attract documentary filmmaker Bernie Ijdis to use the road as the subject of his film, Jalan Raya Pos/De Grote Postweg. Ijdis was obviously drawn to the unsettling aspect of the road's construction: it claimed the lives of hundreds of local workers forced into a long period of labor by the colonial government, without proper food and medication.
To present his thesis, Ijdis uses an unlikely star: Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose banned books during the New Order era made him a cult figure in the literary and political scene. But as the film progresses, the similarities between the plight of the colonial era laborers and Toer's life as a political prisoner and a repressed artist become all too clear.
Jalan Raya Pos is among the four documentaries to be screened at the Jakarta International Film Festival (JIFFest) this week. Along with Winds of Change, a documentary series depicting life in several Asian countries, it is a Festival highlight which offers a look at contemporary Indonesia.
Although the film's premise concerns something that has happened in the past, Ijdis's material totally belongs in the present day, as he treks the road from one end to another and encounters all kinds of local people along the way. He intercuts it with interviews with Toer and images of the author as he reads an essay on the Post Road, an essay Ijdis specifically asked him to write for this film.
This two and a half-hour documentary, however, seems a bit out of focus. At the end we are left with a skimpy sense of the multidimensional figure that Toer is, and barely have enough on the common folk Ijdis interviewed to really root for them. Too often, his interviewees are not identified, making us wonder about one middle-aged subject who posits that "it is normal for people to die during road constructions." And at one stage, the camera barges into a morgue without any sound reason, leaving us only with gruesome images that don't really belong.
But Ijdis' film hits the right note with a night shoot of numerous road workers trying to remedy the impact of a landslide. Accompanied by Toer's voice-over on the Post Road's doomed laborers, it's like we are witnessing the actual construction a century ago. Ijdis's soundbites from the common, often low-income people are also priceless, especially when he interweaves them with an interview with an unsuspecting young Surabayan hotel owner as he dines at a posh restaurant, describing his good and fortunate life.
Close-ups of the common folk are also the strength of Winds of Change, a series produced by an Australian film company in collaboration with filmmakers from Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam. It comprises nine half-hour films, some of which are making their Indonesian debut at JIFFest next Friday.
The films were shot between 1998 and 1999 using Digital Video equipment, and aim to reflect the changes that are sweeping the region as seen in the lives of some families and individuals.
The Indonesian film directors who contributed to the project, Srikaton, Mira Lesmana and Riri Riza, are all veterans in this field, with their own documentary series Anak Seribu Pulau (Children of a Thousand Islands). The five episodes they came up with for Winds of Change are the results of their intensive efforts, following each of their subjects closely and consistently for several months.
Srikaton directed an episode on the family of Mariman, an ethnic Chinese man, who is still recovering from the trauma of the May 1998 riots and is fearfully anticipating the June 1999 election. Another he made is about Tino Saroengallo, a foreign press "fixer," who benefits from the influx of international journalists during Indonesia's riotous climate.
His strongest episode, though, has nothing to do with the country's season of change. It's about Amir, an Ambonese youngster who came to Jakarta to realize his dream of becoming a boxing champion. It's a touching little Rocky in documentary form.
Lesmana also tugs at the heartstrings with her piece on Sarinem and Darsono, a Jakarta couple who have to make do with Darsono's meager salary as a security guard. Things are not looking up for them, especially when their young daughter is stricken with thalassemia.
But the most powerful episode is clearly Riza's piece on Tuti, the mother of missing activist Yani Afri. Riza is absolutely blessed with such an enigmatic figure as his subject. We see how Tuti, with parents of other missing activists, consistently visit Military Headquarters to seek the truth about their children, whom they believe have been kidnapped in covert military operations.
The film shows Tuti brazenly confronting military personnel who try to dissuade her efforts. But there are other moments where we witness her breaking down in frustration at home. Even the children's song My Balloons becomes a song of heartbreak for Tuti as she sings it with a granddaughter: "My green balloon bursts/leaving my heart in sorrow/I only have four balloons now/I'll hold on to them tight."