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Indonesian punks star in Canadian documentary

M. Taufiqurrahman
The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

If local bands or performers have found it hard to make it big
beyond the country's music scene, Balinese punk band Superman Is
Dead (SID) have made their international debut in a rather
simple, yet unusual way: being featured in a documentary film.

The Kuta-based band is the subject of an 87-minute documentary
film, The Punks Are Alright: A Punk Rock Safari From the First
World to The Third, together with two bands of the same genre
from Hamilton, Canada and Sao Paolo, Brazil.

The film delves into the unifying power of music and how it
gives voice to a new generation of young people who long for a
better world than the one in which they live.

The documentary film, produced and directed by Canadian
director Douglas Crawford, tells the story of a cult punk band
from Canada, the Forgotten Angels, a seminal act that inspired
the formation of the Blind Pigs, an aspiring punk band from Sao
Paolo.

The film then travels to Indonesia to meet Dolly, a 23-year
old poor Jakartan, who fell in love with the Blind Pigs.

Dolly was too poor to obtain a copy of the Blind Pigs CD and
asked the band to give him free copies via the Internet.

In the country, the filmmaker also meets Jerinx, a drummer of
SID who tries to make sense of the situation in the tourist
island, where prostitution is rife and terrorism is the new
danger.

Jerinx sees his Balinese folks are caught between surviving to
make ends meet and being enslaved to the West in the tourism
industry.

The mohawked Jerinx is a member of SID, a band that stands as
one of the country's most popular punk outfits that managed to
make their way out of obscurity, without having to abandon their
do-it-yourself ethics or artistic principles.

The band released their first album for major label Sony
Music, Kuta Rock City, in 2003, which sold thousands of copies.
Earlier, the band released four EPs on indie labels.

SID is also featured in the film in concerts, in between
interviews and footage of other bands in performance.

Crawford said that the documentary films started as a short
film about the Forgotten Angels (whose individual band members
are now almost in their fifties), before he learned that there
were kids in Brazil who were passionate about the Canadian band
and an Indonesian kid who was inspired by the band.

"There is a common thread from the Forgotten Rebels to
the Blind Pigs of Brazil to Dolly in Indonesia ... There are
people whose lives has been totally changed by punk," Crawford
told The Jakarta Post.

The Punks Are Alright will be premiered at JiFFest on Dec. 12
and rescreened on Dec. 17.