Garin Nugroho, on his way to finding voice

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): Garin Nugroho looks bemused. He has been having a bit of a tough time. Local audiences pinned such expectations on his film Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang (And the Moon Dances), the favorite Indonesian entrant at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in July, that he has since borne the brunt of bruised hopes.

But among the Indonesian filmmakers whose work was entered in the festival, it is Garin who is the "director". His work has a singular quality. You could say that he is on his way to finding a voice -- financial backers permitting -- or that he is slowly building an audience. He can take comfort in the fact that recent screenings of Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang at Taman Ismail Marzuki were full to overflowing. He is the Indonesian filmmaker who could become a name director, with a signature that signified a set of characteristics in the same way as audiences have come to expect special qualities in the films of established directors.

A film by Garin Nugroho could flag the message to expect distinctive treatment of the contrast between old and new, traditional and contemporary. For others it might simply flag the message "quirky".

He has just completed a sixty-minute documentary for Japanese television NHK about the street children in the Malioboro area of Yogyakara.

A Fairytale about Freedom draws from a well-known Indonesian fairy tale about the tiny defenseless creatures that must survive alongside the tiger and the elephant. He also continues to teach at the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ), to write, and to make commercials and music videos.

His 1994 feature Surat Untuk Bidadari (Letter for an Angel) is being distributed in Germany, Austria and Sweden as an art film. His film Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang will be screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival this month, the first Indonesian film to be accepted for the international section. It will go to Shanghai in November, and has been invited to festivals in Hawaii and Nantes, France.

Next year he will do some sinetron, making telemovie adaptations of some of his short stories like (The) Student and (the) Woman. The story is about a young man who cannot concentrate on his studies because of his desire for a beautiful woman. A kiss is wrested from her, but the outcome has a twist. Another story, San Francisco, is about a couple in Kalimantan who collect Coca-Cola bottle tops in hope of winning that big overseas trip to the city on the bay that Tony Bennett warbles about in his timeless song I Left My heart in San Francisco.

This month selected writings of his are being published as an anthology of essays on film and television. Kekuasaan dan Hiburan (Power and Entertainment), is drawn mostly from 10 years of Garin's contributions to Kompas daily and the now defunct Tempo magazine. The eye-catching cover is from a work by Agus Suwage. It depicts two headless figures (dressed in the audio-visual screen primaries of red, yellow and blue) who are wrestling over a single disembodied head, which appears to have swapped places with a clock face that rolls around in mid-space. At the moment it is only available in Bahasa Indonesian.

He turned a story he wrote while in high school into a play in 1982. The play, Garin's first experience as a director, is a parable about a king who realizes that his people believe more in the computer than in his royal self. The electronic upstart was the king's rival, but to destroy it would also destroy the infrastructure of his country. The king chooses to destroy the computer, plunging his country back to the Dark Ages.

Garin used the story to illustrate "how come" he graduated in sociology of law from university but then turned to film making. He mentions another milestone: He was talking with the pastor of the Catholic college which he had attended about the difficult choice between more law studies at Gajah Mada University and film making at IKJ. He had not stated his preference, simply implied it by saying that the IKJ facilities of the newly opened school were not yet good.

"Forget the facilities," advised this mentor, "Just go (there)."

The rest, as it is said, is history. By 1986, Garin was a prize-winning documentary filmmaker. By 1991, he had become a prize-winning feature filmmaker with his Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti (Love in a Slice of Bread). Garin calls this a "road film" because it entails a trip across Java and an encounter between cultures, the old and the new. It is a significant coincidence that Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti stands among the last "Best" pictures, being recipient of this prize at the Indonesian Film Festival in 1991. The last Indonesian Film Festival was held in 1992. This year Garin received recognition for his music video work, an award from Video Musik Indonesia (TVRI).

His achievement are impressive, but Garin looks a bit perplexed across the table in a restaurant. He has had to ride the choppy waves in the wake of the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, and fend off the comments, some throw-away, some uninformed, that have been made about Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang. In the face of such criticism he has had to maintain faith in his creative capacities. It is okay for the director to be "a little bit egoist," we agree.

According to Garin, he is used to criticism. From a large and cultured Javanese family, he grew up among seven siblings who exercised their cultural expression with parents who exercised their critical faculties on this output in a productive manner. Most of his brothers and sisters are professionals involved in the arts or humanities. Doing law at university then becoming a film director is not unusual in a family where a brother who lectured in ceramics at the Bandung Institute of Technology has turned to dance performance and another brother trained in accounting has turned to sociology and television program research.

Who are his favorite directors? Garin chose five. There is Robert Altman, who from The Wedding through to Pret-a-Porter has made idiosyncratic Hollywood films which draw attention to foibles in contemporary U.S. mores. There is Australian director Peter Weir who is particularly skilled at inventing atmosphere (remember Witness, The Last Wave) to make the flesh crawl.

Woody Allen is another favorite, as is Japanese director Ozu ("His films are at once simple and complex.") And lately he has been most impressed by the creative verve of Polish director Krzystof Kieslowki of Three Colours Red, Blue and White.

Of all the aspects of film -- production, exhibition and distribution -- he finds the lack of audience appreciation in Indonesia the most frustrating. The answer was surprising from a filmmaker who had to take Bulan to Singapore for processing and whose award-winning feature Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti only lasted a few days on local screens.

Responding to comments that his film Bulan is either too long, too slow or too ambiguous, he says that generally held concepts about what is good cinema are far too narrow here. They are the outcome of a saturation diet of Hollywood action films that have blocked audience interest in any other type of screen entertainment.

"He wanted to change the world," says Garin of his publisher father who ran a small public library of Javanese literature.

Perhaps a filmmaker will fare better -- he just wants to alter some perceptions. People have told him he is "stupid" to enter film production during this "crisis" era. That may be just the point -- that this is the time to do it. What else can you expect from someone whose dictum is "Be adventurous"?